Dear Reader,

I recently found myself in the unexpected position of needing to defend spring, a season which is generally uncontroversial. But I have a friend who is a staunch devotee of summer. Spring is just a work in progress, he contends, an unfinished sketch. Summer, on the other hand, is the completed painting, the masterwork all ablaze with green and punctuated with flowers in full bloom. And I, though I love spring for itself and not just as a pale shadow of what is to come, had no defense at the ready. 

So as spring came, rather later than usual, to New Hampshire, I gave it some thought. And I realized that to me, spring is the season that most demands and best rewards my attention. True, in the summer I can simply glance out the window of a moving car to be struck by the magnificence of the New England scenery. But spring is different. Around here, winter very slowly looses its hold and spring creeps quietly in, and if I forget to look out the window at the branches that have been bare for so many months on end, or to go outside before it’s really warm enough to be comfortable, I won’t see the tiny budding leaves on our maple tree or the shocking green tips of the evergreens or the earliest violets. (Especially this year, as they were promptly buried in a foot of snow.) If I get too busy in the spring, I’ll look up and find that all the lilacs and redbuds and forsythia are blooming, and the brief window of their splendor is about to close. If I want to see the loveliest parts of spring, I must look closely and attentively. They are so easy to miss, and once missed, gone. 

“Attention is love,” Katy Carl writes in her essay for this issue, “this much we must know.” And most of us do. (Anyone with a toddler can’t help but know it.) But we live in what Eliot called “this twittering world,” a twilight “place of disaffection” where it’s all too easy to be “distracted from distraction by distraction.” We have to actively choose to look away from the biggest, brightest, loudest things (and the next brightest, and the next, and the next) if we are to know anything intimately, to give the “absolutely unmixed attention” that Simone Weil tells us “is prayer.” We have to do that over and over again, in fact, if we are to become the sort of people who are capable of giving, much less sustaining, that kind of attention. (As Joshua Rio-Ross writes, for both humans and computers, “decisions about ‘attention’ in a world of infinite choices force questions of ‘character.’”) And I for one need to be nudged sometimes into making that choice—to be reminded that it matters where I turn my gaze. 

Our writers for this issue have considered the question of attention from a variety of angles. In “Lingering in the World,” Asher Gelzer-Govatos suggests that beyond sight, we can use our sense of touch to ground our attention where we want it. Alice Courtright, in “Close Your Eyes,” describes how she came to know that she is both a provider of attention (to her children) and a recipient of it (from our ever-attentive God). We hope that you, too, will be reminded that bestowing your attention is not only a choice, but one that bears the weight of glory every time.

Fare Forward,
Sarah Clark
Editor-in-Chief