William Wordsworth, Jenny Odell, and the Power of Attention

Reading Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel a few weeks ago reminded me of my Wordsworth, who frequently claims that our memories of nature can be recalled in times of distress to relieve our suffering. And, even more importantly, the recall of nature can make us better people. Consider this section from “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey“:

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.

Remembering nature gives us “tranquil restoration,” and, because we feel less distressed, we are more likely to perform “acts of kindness and of love.” Or, attention leads to memory, and memory leads to care. People with good memories of nature are better community members. (For a less linguistically dense version of the same sentiment, you might remind yourself of “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud.”)

de Botton invokes Wordsworth’s idea that nature is “an indispensable corrective to the psychological damage inflicted by life in the city.” I’m more interested in the fact that this corrective is not necessarily in the observation itself, but, more subtly, in the memory and recall of that observation.

Memory is, right now, a site of serious cultural anxiety. Is the ability to outsource your brain to Google harming you, or is it giving you freedom to focus on what really matters, instead of trivia? Or, as one might consider with a Wordsworthian lens, are we still capable of recalling beauty in times of distress, or even non-distress? If not, what is stopping us?

With the help of the ever-present cameras in our pockets, we document as our primary way of noticing. We take a lot of photos–1.8 billion photos a day were uploaded in 2014.  The science of what happens to our memories when they are mediated by our cameras is still murky, but the cluster of research is illuminating in itself. We are, collectively, worried that we are shortchanging our memories because we take too many photos, but if we don’t take the photos, how will we remember?

(The same anxieties infuse our relationships: if we aren’t Facebook friends, are we even friends? How will we keep up with each other? Underneath it is the undeniable feeling that “keeping up with each other” is exactly the problem, depersonalizing our relationships into group updates.)

Attention itself, that base component of memory, has also fractured. Without observation in the first place, there is nothing to recall, but faced with time away from our electronic devices, we quickly become fidgety and uncomfortable. In our alarm that such a radical shift in attention has happened so quickly, we look for root causes, like the addictive nature of social media, without considering that paying attention in, and to, our overwhelming environment is hard. The phones in our hands on the train are a way of enforcing a boundary between ourselves and a world prone to outbursts of physical and/or psychic violence.

Clinging to our safety net of “curated content” is sometimes the best that we can do, but that safety is also a limitation. Our scattered attention shields us not just from others but also from our own introspection. Pema Chodron is not talking about social media when she discusses the spiritual work of refraining, but her book When Things Fall Apart (2000) is very prescient:

Refraining is…the quality of not grabbing for entertainment the minute we feel a slight edge of boredom coming on. It’s the practice of not immediately filling up space just because there’s a gap… There’s something there in us that we don’t want to experience, and we never do experience, because we’re so quick to act [to fill every gap].

Attention is unsettling. It requires us to be with both a very hard world and with our own (often damaged) internal processes. It shows us things we don’t want to see. In order to “reclaim” it, we have to have reasons good enough to motivate our own discomfort. (It’s a good time to mention that there is a very strong correlative link between social media usage in teenage girls and depression, but it’s unclear which one is actually the cause.)

Let’s return to Wordsworth, who would agree that attention is unsettling. That was his entire point. The young Wordsworth was a political radical, after all, although his later patrician tendencies are never very far from the surface. Part of his project was to disrupt a complacent and corrupt system by reminding people that nature exists, that the man-made world is not all-encompassing:

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

Wordsworth lived through an industrial revolution as profound as our technological one, and he, too, needed to remind audiences that there were (and are) things in the world we should look to with our “heart” that “receives” besides scientific discoveries and new gadgets.

It is a sentiment modernized by Jenny Odell, in her book How to Do Nothing, in which she pairs attention with revolutionary community building:

Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented toward something outside of ourselves. Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding—seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions—and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up towards us but can never be fully grasped or known.

Attention reveals, and revels in, uncertainty, and for Odell this allows attention to be a communal act of resistance to the commercialization of our interiority. There is a revolutionary power in paying attention outside of what she calls the “attention economy” of social media. It reconnects us to the world, and to community. We have not lost our ability to pay attention, Odell argues; we’ve just allowed it to become a corporate product, and corporate products are inherently uninterested in revolutionary ways of being. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is hard to monetize. It allows for possibility.

Our fractured attention separates us from community and self, from experience and memory. The alternative is not always comfortable: sometimes our attention reveals a world that we don’t want to pay attention to. But distraction isn’t selective, and in using it to separate ourselves from the uncomfortable, we lose the possibility of connection. While we need to be compassionate toward the thin boundaries of our fragile selves, we should perhaps let Wordsworth and Odell remind us of the stakes, and the solaces, of presence and memory.

Without strong communities, it is hard to engage with a fraught reality, but without engagement it is hard to have strong communities.It isn’t enough to, or is in fact impossible to, “take back our attention,” though. We first have to relearn our desire to pay attention, and to consider why that desire faded in the first place.

Before we can remember, we must look. Before we can look, we must want to look. Before we can want to look, we must be able to trust our capacity to adapt to, to empathize with, and to understand what we see.