On the Cultivation of Attention
An essay, 1873

It is the peculiar misfortune of our age — an age of telegraphs, of penny papers, and of railway time-tables — that the faculty of attention, which our grandfathers exercised as naturally as they breathed, must now be cultivated with the deliberate care one bestows upon a delicate orchid; for the mind of the modern reader, solicited at every hour by a hundred trifling novelties, has grown so accustomed to flitting that it can scarcely be persuaded to alight.

Consider the scholar of the last century: he possessed, perhaps, forty books, and he knew them as a shepherd knows his flock — not by their covers merely, but by their inmost character, their weaknesses, their peculiar virtues. His grandson possesses four thousand, and knows none of them; he has traded intimacy for acquaintance, and acquaintance, multiplied indefinitely, becomes a kind of ignorance more hopeless than the honest ignorance of the ploughman, because it wears the costume of learning.

I do not say that the remedy lies in renouncing the abundance of the age; that would be as foolish as to renounce the railway because our fathers walked. The remedy lies rather in the discipline of election: in choosing, from among the innumerable claimants upon our notice, the few that deserve it, and in attending to those few with the whole force of the mind. Attention is not a gift but a habit; it is formed, like all habits, by repetition; and he who reads one page with his whole soul has done more for his understanding than he who turns a hundred leaves with that drowsy half-consciousness which is the reader's besetting sin.

The objection will be raised that the affairs of modern life demand a divided mind; that the merchant must watch twenty markets, the statesman twenty capitals. I answer that division of labour is one thing, and division of attention another; the merchant who watches twenty markets watches them one at a time, and his success is exactly proportioned to the completeness with which, for the moment, the other nineteen cease to exist for him.

Let the reader, then, make trial of a simple regimen: let him choose each morning one worthy object — a book, a problem, a piece of work — and give to it one uninterrupted hour, admitting no rival to his thoughts, however clamorous; and let him persevere in this practice for a single month. I will venture to promise that at the month's end he will have recovered a power which he had supposed lost with his childhood, and with it a tranquillity of spirit which no abundance of hurried acquisitions can ever supply; for the attentive mind is not merely a better instrument — it is a happier one.
