The Gift of Attention/ A Desire to Worship
Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, Sally Rooney, Simone Weil
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The year is 1925, forty-three years after Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, just seven years after the Great War claimed 20 million lives. Virginia Woolf’s aristocratic protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, is spending a dizzying morning walking around in London, preparing for her big party while bathing in the ebb and flow of city life. She glories in what Woolf called “moments of being,” intense quotidian instances that are perceived as unveiled truths, passionate experiences of the deepening of reality.
As she walks through a charmingly chaotic London square, noting the intricacies of human interactions there, Woolf tells us: “What she loved was this, here, now, in front of her.” But these deeply loved moments are also contingent, non-linear, disconnected. Clarissa’s desire for both linearity and connectedness is reflected in her longing for shared communal experiences, especially the shared experience of wonder and, dare I say–WORSHIP.
When she returns home to prepare for her party, she hears the cook whistle in the kitchen and “the click of the typewriter” as she “bowed beneath the influence” and “felt blessed and purified,” recognizing how “moments like this are buds in the tree of life.” Woolf then writes that she felt the need to “pay back for this secret deposit of exquisite moments” although “not for a minute did she believe in God.”
In the midst of the postwar modern despair of the Lost Generation, Clarissa Dalloway wants to throw a party to connect the individual moments of being: “she must go back; she must assemble” in order to “feel the beauty”.
Not only this, the party is the ultimate attempt to give back, to say thanks, to worship. “And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom? An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift.”
Clarissa wants to give thanks, to stand in awe and wonder of some unknown presence behind all the beauty. What stops her?
Clarissa Dalloway’s character reflects many of her author’s own central tensions, including a love for the connected beauty of the world that is so strong that it craves the capacity to find and worship the source of this beauty. Both women were atheists who grappled with how to respond to the overflowing gifts of the everyday.
Writing more than a hundred years earlier than Woolf, poet William Wordsworth confesses his desire to worship something greater than himself in “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798".” This autobiographical poem is about the relationship between creativity and memory. Nature –and especially the Wye Valley, a favorite childhood haunt– is less the subject of the poem and more the object that helps the poet understand the growth of his imagination (coupled with the many sobering losses that we all feel when moving from childhood to adulthood).
At this point in his life, Wordsworth’s religion–like that of many Romantic artists–seems to be adoration of both the ‘creative genius’ of the artist and the sublime wonder of nature. At one point in the poem, Wordsworth sounds like a Pantheist, proclaiming that he had long been a “worshipper of nature.”
Yet there is one magical, moving part in “Tintern Abbey” when the poet recognizes that the “worship” of nature is incomplete. He longs to acknowledge the personal source of nature’s beauty, the one who connects all things, yet is not the same as all things. He writes:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Wordsworth recognizes that a supernatural “presence,” a “motion and a spirit” is the one who “rolls through all things” and “interfuses” the human mind with nature. He understands that this unnamed “presence” is so powerful and beautiful and whole that he is “disturbed” by the “joy” of how it connects all things. This “presence” is not spoken of as an “it” but as a personal, knowable being, “whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.” Wordsworth’s description of this personal and universal Spirit sounds very much like the Greek understanding of the “Logos”–the Life in the center of the universe, who both creates and holds all things together.
As Eliot writes in “Burnt Norton” from Four Quartets:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
It is not surprising that between 1806 and 1812, Wordsworth gradually moved back towards the Christian faith that he learned in his childhood.
Both Woolf and Wordsworth, as artists and lovers of nature, paid intense, loving attention to their surroundings. Whether the hustle and bustle of a London street or the silent richness of a cliff above a riverbank, both of these authors learned to fixate their eyes, their imaginations, and their spirits on the beauty of the present moment–and this propelled them both into acts of worship. Even though neither writer could name the ultimate object of their worship, their desire for thankfulness and supplication is obvious.
In a section titled “Attention and Will” in Gravity and Grace, philosopher Simone Weil claims that “To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever we truly pay attention, we are praying.” Were Wordsworth and Woolf praying?
For Weil, paying “extreme attention” is a religious act: “Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man and the only extreme attention is religious.” Weil also relates this gift of attention to the love of neighbor. In her discussion of The Good Samaritan Parable, she argues that “attention is creative.” This is a paradoxical claim because, according to Weil, attention is also an act of supplication to both God and the other. Yet only in attentive supplication can true creation be born: the creation of worship, the creation of prayer.
Although the thoughts written above have been dancing around my mind for a long time, I decided to write this post after reading Sally Rooney’s 2021 novel, Beautiful World, Where are You.
The novel is about the mental, spiritual, and relational growth of four friends in Ireland. In one letter that protagonist Ellen writes to her best friend, Alice (both friends are agnostic), she shares her experience of attentiveness to everyday beauty and meaning”
“I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this to you before, but a few years ago, I started keeping a diary, which I called ‘the life book’. I began with the idea of writing one short entry each day, just a line or two, describing something good. I suppose by ‘good’ I must have meant something that made me happy or brought me pleasure. I went back to look at it the other day, and the early entries are all from that autumn, almost six years ago now. Dry upturned sycamore leaves scuttling like claws along the South Circular Road. The artificial buttered taste of popcorn in the cinema. Paleyellow sky in the evening, Thomas Street draped in mist. Things like that…
And reading those entries now, I do remember what I felt, or at least what I saw and heard and noticed. Walking around, even on a bad day, I would see things — I mean just the things that were in front of me. People’s faces, the weather, traffic. The smell of petrol from the garage, the feeling of being rained on, completely ordinary things. And in that way even the bad days were good, because I felt them and remembered feeling them. There was something delicate about living like that — like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me “(144).
Like Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Wordsworth, Ellen was paying “extreme attention.” And only in doing this, did she feel like “I was an instrument.” Unlike Woolf and Wordsworth, she does not allude to the possible source of this beauty (although elsewhere in the novel she ruminates on the possible existence of God). But she feels that life and beauty have somehow “reverberated inside” her in a deeply personal way. In writing her observations down, she becomes even more attentive. When she was not writing down, she was only “seeing but not looking” as “the visual world came to me flat, like a catalogue of information” (145).
Ellen’s practice of slow, careful looking was enhanced by creating memories through writing. This practice enabled her to see life in the center of creation, both in the simple and the magnificent things. She saw the shape and texture of reality rather than treating it like a “flat…catalogue of information.”
All of these testimonies to the creative, loving power of attentiveness are also connected to a desire to worship, to give thanks, to pray in front of the source of beauty and goodness.
In contemporary poet Christian Wiman’s conversion narrative (shared in The American Scholar), he explains that one reason he was wary of becoming a Christian was that the Christian life seemed so stripped of beauty and creativity. But only after his gift of poetic attentiveness was so enhanced after his supplication to Christ did he see that the truth was the opposite:
“I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it.”
Let us all pay attention in a more loving way that delivers us INTO the earth, TOWARDS our neighbors and GOD.
Thanks for reading!