Note:
This essay was first published on my newsletter, Kindred Spirits. Read (and subscribe!) here.
I’ve always liked the idea that attention can make the world larger; that the more carefully we look, the more there is to see. It’s one of the reasons I read: a writer notices something I’ve failed to notice and, for a while afterwards, I borrow their eyes.
Attention makes things more particular. When you learn the names of trees that grow around you, something I’ve been doing lately, what was once a blur of green separates out into individual species with their own quirks and characteristics. I find that this particularity often makes each thing more solid, more dear. When fewer of its parts start to feel interchangeable, the world feels richer.
In the last couple of days, after the inimitable Annie Dillard died, I kept seeing her described as someone who taught us to pay attention. She did, after all, write:
At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive.
This description is both true and not enough. If you think about it, attention has become synonymous with appreciation. I notice the small things with the hope of deriving joy from it. I look up at the trees, whose names I now know, to see the dappled light and feel a rush of affection flood my limbs. There is an implicit promise here that the world will reward us—and a reward is always positive, right?—for looking more closely at it.
Dillard, I feel, knew better.
There’s a scene in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek where she watches a frog sitting at the edge of a pond. Suddenly, it begins to collapse. Its body caves in and wrinkles until what remains is almost an empty sack of skin. A giant water bug has bitten the frog and is digesting it from the inside, sucking its liquefied organs out through its mouth.
This, too, is what you see when you pay attention. Gun to my head, I couldn’t call it a reward.
Pilgrim is always pitched as a book about wonder. In many ways, it is, but this wonder also gives way to things much, much harder to digest. The irreconcilable truth is that the natural world is both spectacularly beautiful and incomprehensibly wasteful. Things eat one another alive. Parasites leisurely hollow out their hosts. Creatures reproduce in such head-spinning abundance because most of what they create won’t survive. She says it herself:
…that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives…
Life appears everywhere, but individual lives appear to matter very little.
A lot of how we talk about attention assumes that sight and appreciation are the same thing. But sometimes, looking closely ruins the rosy view. If you walk through a city enough times, you know what’s behind the streets you once naively found romantic. You can learn enough about something to see what compromises sustain it. You can start to know a person well enough that the qualities you once rounded up in the name of charm become unavoidably prickly. Even self-knowledge doesn’t escape: there are versions of ourselves that survive simply because we haven’t looked at them too closely.
I think this is maybe why “pay attention” feels rather weak as a description of what Dillard was doing. To restore yourself to the world, learn to appreciate it again. But the flip side is that attention also makes the world stranger, less coherent, and in some ways harder to defend.
Why should the world need defending from us?
I think we’re very uncomfortable with things that fail to—or refuse to—justify themselves. Over lunch, a friend who recently went through a breakup said, sadly, “I swept a lot of things under the carpet. But he did help me through the time I went through surgery. That counts for something, right?”
When something we love disappoints us, we want to see the thing that makes that disappointment tolerable. 2024 was shit, but it taught me things. The city is maddening, but it has an ineffable energy. We really want whatever is painful or ugly to also present some proof that it isn’t entirely for nothing. We provide redemption, which lets us look a flaw in its face without surrendering our affection for what it’s a part of.
Dillard’s frog resists this redemption, because there’s no secret loveliness in the scene. The frog is eaten alive by the water bug because this is what water bugs do. Nature didn’t set this event up for our moral education, or for our benediction.
In this sense, Dillard’s attention is extremely hard to grapple with. It’s one thing to say that the world contains ugliness alongside beauty, because it puts the two on opposite pans of a scale, which is a pretty palatable image. In this world, sunsets can eventually balance out the water bugs. But it’s a completely different moral ballgame to understand that some things resist this scale entirely.
Which brings me to the question: Should something have to be redeemable before we can love it?
As humans, we want everything to mean something. I don’t think it’s a failure of imagination, or being unable to accept the world for what it is (easier said than done). I think it’s more a fundamental aspect of being human: We expect actions to have balanced consequences. We want innocence to count for something. When those expectations are violated, it feels deeply wrong.
This is the problem that Dillard runs headlong into in Pilgrim. She writes that “we are moral creatures” confronting a world that seemingly isn’t organised around morality at all. Elsewhere, she says:
That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
This is a truth that can feel both obvious and difficult. A water bug isn’t being cruel, because cruelty implies it’s possible for the water bug to choose to behave otherwise. Nature doesn’t distribute suffering according to what merits it and what doesn’t. It just does what it does.
This truth brings us to an impossibility: we emerge into a world that is, in the grand scheme of things, indifferent to the individual life, but we carry an absurd attachment to it. We want to love the world, and we want to see the world justify itself for it, but that doesn’t automatically mean the world is obliged to.
I think that to read Dillard is to face the reality that some of what I love about the world and some of what horrifies me about it don’t resolve into each other at all. Beauty doesn’t excuse cruelty, but neither does cruelty negate beauty. They’re both just true.
The world won’t be beautiful for us to love it. Its cruelties won’t resolve satisfyingly into lessons, and its wastes won’t become meaningful so we can be more comfortable with it.
In the smaller microcosm of the world—our individual lives—this matters too. Some bad years won’t teach me anything. A person I love might suffer in ways that I can’t magick into wisdom. None of this precludes the dappled light I keep looking up to find on tree canopies, and none of the dappled light explains it away either. I might experience a blow in the afternoon only for the sky to beat out the most incredible sunset right after. Beauty will arrive with no relation to what came before it.
Attention makes things more particular, but it also makes them harder to simplify. “We don’t know what’s going on here”, Dillard wrote, “[…] Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there”.
The world can come into finer focus, but that doesn’t make it easier to reconcile. It just makes it much harder to look away.