How nineteenth-century “disciplines of attention” anticipated the contemporary concern with mindfulness and being “spiritual but not religious”
Today, we’re driven to distraction, our attention overwhelmed by the many demands upon it―most of which emanate from our beeping and blinking digital devices. This may seem like a decidedly twenty-first-century problem, but, as Caleb Smith shows in this elegantly written, meditative work, distraction was also a serious concern in American culture two centuries ago. In Thoreau’s Axe, Smith explores the strange, beautiful archives of the nineteenth-century attention revival―from a Protestant minister’s warning against frivolous thoughts to Thoreau’s reflections on wakefulness at Walden Pond. Smith examines how Americans came to embrace attention, mindfulness, and other ways of being “spiritual but not religious,” and how older Christian ideas about temptation and spiritual devotion endure in our modern ideas about distraction and attention.
Smith explains that nineteenth-century worries over attention developed in response to what were seen as the damaging mental effects of new technologies and economic systems. A “wandering mind,” once diagnosed, was in need of therapy or rehabilitation. Modeling his text after nineteenth-century books of devotion, Smith offers close readings of twenty-eight short passages about attention. Considering social reformers who designed moral training for the masses, religious leaders who organized Christian revivals, and spiritual seekers like Thoreau who experimented with regimens of simplified living and transcendental mysticism, Smith shows how disciplines of attention became the spiritual exercises of a distracted age.
Author(s): Caleb Smith
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 253
City: Princeton
Cover
Contents
Introduction: Distraction and the Disciplines of Attention
Part I. From the Devil to Distraction
1. “Wandring or distraction” (Thomas Clayton)
2. “Satan had hidden the very object from my mind” (Jarena Lee)
3. “Hundreds of thousands have their appetite so depraved” (J. H. McIlvaine)
4. “My non-compliance would almost always produce much confusion” (Frederick Douglass)
5. “Opium-like listlessness” (Herman Melville)
6. “Morbid attention” (Edgar Allan Poe)
7. “The shell of lethargy” (William James)
Part II. Reform
8. “A white man could, if he had paid as much attention” (Lydia Maria Child)
9. “The cultivation of attention as a moral duty” (Elizabeth Palmer Peabody)
10. “The heart must be cultivated” (William Watkins)
11. “You might see him looking steadily at something” (Susan Paul)
12. “Their nobler faculties lie all undeveloped” (William D. Kelley)
13. “Subdued and tender” (A. D. Eddy)
14. “If he wanted to kill time” (Austin Reed)
Part III. Revival
15. “All attention to the last sermon” (James Dana)
16. “The power of fixed and continuous attention” (Robert Baird)
17. “The relations of business and religion” (Henry Clay Fish)
18. “My mind was powerfully wrought upon” (William Apess)
19. “I began to direct my attention to this great object” (Nat Turner)
20. “Hear me now, love your heart” (Toni Morrison)
21. “Read these leaves in the open air” (Walt Whitman)
Part IV. Devotion
22. “Noble sentiments of devotion” (J. S. Buck minster and Ann Plato)
23. “Savoir attendre” (Adrien Rouquette)
24. “The greatest exercise of mind” (Anonymous/Abraham Jacobs)
25. “A true sauntering of the eye” (Henry David Thoreau)
26. “If we do not guard the mind” (Hannah More)
27. “The valves of her attention” (Emily Dickinson)
28. “Aroma finer than prayer” (Walt Whitman)
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
