Mike Caulfield from NewsWise | YouTube
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)After yesterday’s search for the source of Simone Weil’s oft-quoted “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” went a bit Lot-49ish on me, I wondered whether I should just have been satisfied with that “attributed to.” But I’m glad I didn’t let it go, for a couple of reasons.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)Among the reading I’ve picked up thanks to suggestions from the most generous readers of the draft of Generous Thinking is a bit of Simone Weil. Alan Jacobs, who pointed me toward her work in a couple of spots, noted in particular that she “seems to have thought that [attention] is the primary form of generosity.” So I’ve been reading around in the places where her thoughts turn to attention, including Gravity and Grace and Waiting for God. A quick search online for Weil and attention, however, surfaces a vast number of references to her most quotable quote:Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.