a bi-monthly meetup where we read essays that push us to think deeper and be better.

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Weil was a French philosopher and mystic whose work sits uniquely and beautifully between philosophy, theology, politics, labor, suffering, and the inner life. Albert Camus described her as “the only great spirit of our times,”. The piece we are reading comes from Gravity and Grace, a posthumous collection of fragments and passages drawn from notebooks she entrusted to farmer-philosopher-friend Gustave Thibon before her death.

The essay itself is quite short, but it does not behave like a short essay. It is more like a set of compressed philosophical-spiritual fragments. Some sentences look simple on first read, then open up if you sit with them for a little longer. One of the lines that often circulates from the piece is: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” But the sentence after it is just as interesting: “If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.”

Context on our reading (PART 1)

In San Francisco, we spend a lot of time talking about agency, ambition, will, execution, building, wanting, and changing external reality. These are real and important energies, but Weil offers a slightly different frame. She asks us to consider whether inner transformation happens less through tightening, forcing, and clenching, and more through a particular quality of attention. She writes that “we have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will."

So this week’s reading room is partly about attention as a spiritual faculty, but also attention as a practical question for modern life. What are we giving our attention to? What are we training ourselves to notice? What are we learning to ignore? How do platforms, algorithms, relationships, cities, institutions, and ambitions shape the direction of our gaze? And how might a meaningful life require discernment about which realities deserve our attention and which do not?

Context on our reading (PART 2)

Simone Weil on Attention and Grace – The Marginalian

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Reading Rooms SF

a bi-monthly meetup where we read essays that push us to think deeper and be better.

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