"A certain grain of stupidity"

Flannery O'Connor, Charlotte Mason, and the habit of attention as a habit of being, for writers and other humans

“But there’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it…”

Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”

parsley flower after an early morning summer rain

Flannery O’Connor had a way with words. Reading her letters you get the impression that not much could fool her, that there probably wasn’t a wool thick enough that could obscure her insight into human nature. She has the same piercing understanding of literature, from both how it functions to how a writer writes (and how a reader reads) well. In one of her letters, she tells the story of an eager young author who has asked if he could come to her home and visit, mentioning before hanging up the phone that he would be bringing a manuscript along. “He was writing a deeply philosophical novel (thought he) about a lad horribly like himself,” she says. “All the chapters…were full of stuff about ‘the sense of time.’ He explained that while there were long philosophical passages, he was cutting these up with scenes. I was treated to the reading of one scene which he announced was the ‘love’ section. At that point I was too tired to laugh so I didn’t disgrace myself. I discreetly tried to suggest that fiction was about people and not about the sense of time but I am sure I made no impression.”¹

In this one episode, so clearly sketched by Miss O’Connor, we have a perfect example of someone who sees clearly because she has spent time staring, watching, observing – and someone who, though he thinks himself wise, is a bit obtuse.

Miss O’Connor is right. There is a certain grain of stupidity you and I can’t do without, whether or not we are writers. This is the ability to stare.

Staring is a quality often associated with the slow, the backward, or the plain old rude. It can certainly accompany all these things. I’m sure most of us were told not to stare when we were children, and those of us with children have almost certainly passed this rule on. It’s one of the most basic social laws; a glance or even a lingering look might be fine, but staring is invasive at best and threatening at worst. We teach our children that we can intrude on others without even moving or touching them. Just to stare is enough.

I grew up in a place where it was considered rude to pass a stranger on the street and not look them in the eye and say hello or nod in acknowledgement. Today, I live in a place where this is considered invasive. People pass each other on the street and rarely acknowledge one another. Strangers stand together in a line, and no one chats or makes small talk, let alone look at each other. People isolate themselves in public and behave like this is normal, like it is rude to break into each other’s little bubbles and force an interaction that the person didn’t invite. It could be that this is just my odd little area of the country, but I don’t think so. I think our private worlds are shrinking and we are getting more intentional about building walls and maintaining them and defending them. Because of this, I think staring is more important than Flannery could have foreseen. It’s the difference between indifference to the world and interest in it. It is like going on a drive to see where you end up and driving to actually get somewhere, to follow directions like, “When you come to the blue house with the white trim, turn right.” You can’t let the scenery slide by your eyes without notice. You need to pay attention. “Attention” is the crux. Attention accompanies intention.

What is Attention?

Simone Weil in “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” said, “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. …our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.”

In other words, suspend judgement and assumption. Wait and watch. Focus entirely on the thing at hand. Try to see it as it is in itself. As Flannery said, we should stare.

Charlotte Mason, the British educator and educational reformer of the early 20^th century, had a lot to say about what she called, “the Habit of Attention” –

“…no intellectual habit is so valuable as that of attention; it is a mere habit but it is also the hallmark of an educated person.”²

No intellectual habit is so valuable as paying attention. This is the beginning, the middle, and the end of education.

She defines attention as, “The power of turning the whole force of the mind upon the subject brought before it. Concentration differs from attention in that the mind is actively engaged on some given problem rather than passively receptive.”

“A Certain Grain of Stupidity”…?

Notice that Mason and Weil both describe attention as a passive, receptive posture to the thing at which we are looking. I think this is why Flannery calls it “a certain grain of stupidity.” We are staring because we don’t know about the thing, and our staring is an admission of that fact. It is a posture of humility. Very often, this kind of staring will have us looking at things we think we know, or think we should know, but come to realize – as we stare – that we don’t really know this particular thing at all.

When I was 13, I spent a week at a nature camp. We spent the week hiking, identifying plants, learning skills like canoeing and how to make teddy bears out of burs (I’ve never found a real life application for this one, other than impressing my children when they were very, very young), singing environmentalist campfire songs (“the earth is our mother/we must take care of her”), all fairly typical and expected. But the most vivid memory I have from this experience happened in the Swamps and Marshes class. We hiked out to the camp’s marsh and while we stood on the shore, we were told to let our senses tell us what we were experiencing. For about five minutes we stood beside that odorous wetland and observed, or tried to look like we were observing. Most of the group was glancing around, snickering at the sulfurous smell or wondering how long we’d stand here before we could break for lunch.

Then our teacher stepped into the marsh and said, “Let’s go!” He now had the class’s full and undivided attention. No way was he serious. But he was and eventually each of us stepped into that dark, stagnant water and followed him into the thick of the marsh. Every time we took a step forward, the cool water swirled up the smell of rotting plants and who know what else. The lime green duckweed parted neatly for us as we went from ankle deep water to calf deep to passed-our-knees. The cattails were now taller than most of us. Mosquitoes thought Thanksgiving came early. As we walked, I think he told us facts about Swamps and Marshes, but all I remember is the experience of wading through cool, smelly marsh water on a hot summer afternoon, slapping bugs. When we reached a point where the shore was no longer visible, our teacher stopped and turn to us. “Alright,” he said, his voice quiet, forcing us to listen, “We are going to stand here in total silence for the next 5 minutes and I want you to pay attention to what your senses tell you. Yes, we all know it smells like a fart –“ we laughed, and some of the boys looked a bit disappointed that they couldn’t use that as an observation, “but what else? What do you see? What do you hear? What do you feel? Don’t taste the water, or anything else, but try to use as many senses as you can. Experience the marsh.”

I have never forgotten that experience. The difference in experiencing the marsh from the shoreline versus in the middle of it was the difference of reading about a place and going there. Everything else about the week at camp is either a vague memory or totally forgotten, but standing in that marsh water under the clear summer sky, silent but hearing so many sounds I had never noticed before – frogs croaking, red-winged blackbirds trilling back and forth, even the lap of the water against our legs - and smelling more than just rot, I started to see the marsh as beautiful, a whole other world than the nature I usually experienced. It is not an overstatement to say it was a paradigm shift for me. I was not bored. Once I stopped talking and moving and just stared, my world expanded. I forgot myself and got to know a place I had seen but not really seen before.

“The Least You Can Do is Look at Me!”

Staring means we are not just looking because we have to rest our eyes somewhere, but we are looking to see. If it is a tree we are staring at, we are staring at the tree to see it as it is. This is passive, but it is passive in the way a runner is passive before the start of a race, or an artist before the brush touches the canvas. The mind is passive yet focused and ready for action.

In The Nature and Aim of Fiction, Flannery O’Conner writes specifically to writers of fiction, but as is usually the case with good advice, what she applies specifically to writers can apply to the larger crowd of humans living in the world. We could say it applies to “The Nature and Aim of Life.” The entire essay is about the importance of the writer knowing the concrete world so well that he or she can communicate it clearly (concretely) to the reader: “I want to talk about one quality of fiction which I think is its least common denominator – the fact that it is concrete – and about a few of the qualities that follow from this. We will be concerned in this with the reader in his fundamental human sense, because the nature of fiction is in large measure determined by the nature of our perceptive apparatus. The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions. But the world of the fiction writer is full of matter and this is what the beginning fiction writers are very loath to create. They are concerned primarily with unfleshed ideas and emotions. They are apt to be reformers and to want to write because they are possessed not by a story but by the bare bones of some abstract notion. They are conscious of problems, not of people, of questions and issues, not of the texture of existence, of case histories and of everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.”

Remember Miss O’Connor’s guest, the eager young man with his philosophical novel? Remember when he read the “love” scene and she thanked God she was too tired by that time to laugh out loud? Is that the proper response to a well-written scene of that kind? Her response makes one wonder if his scene was also a bit too philosophical. If it had been concrete, if it had been appealing through the senses, laughter would not be the appropriate reaction. But this man had either forgotten or hadn’t ever learned that “the nature of fiction is in large measure determined by the nature of our perceptive apparatus.”

Lest I sound like I’m being unduly hard on this eager young philosophical novelist, I will readily admit that writing a concrete description – a description that is true to the thing and that the reader can experience with their senses – is very, very difficult. I was in a six-week writing class several years ago (taught by Jonathan Rogers, and which I highly recommend, though my writing is not necessarily his fault, unless it’s good; then, “thank you, Mr. Rogers!”) and one of the exercises was writing about something in concrete detail. Difficult doesn’t begin to describe it. When I sat down to do the assignment, I was stumped. I had chosen to describe the fruit of the flowering quince. How do I describe this lumpy golden fruit to someone who has never seen it before? Verbal constipation has never been a problem for me, and yet in that moment, I was backed up. I couldn’t come up with anything. Eventually I completed the assignment – I’m not exactly sure how well I did; I’m pretty sure Mr. R wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to picture after my description of the fruit – but the memory of that struggle has stayed with me. It comes to mind every time I write.

Charlotte Mason, in “School Education,” quotes Sir Philip Magnus: “It is not enough that a child should learn how to write, he must know what to write. He must learn to describe clearly what he has heard or seen, to transfer to written language he sense-impressions, and to express concisely his own thoughts.”

In “Towards a Philosophy of Education,” she writes, “Whatever a child or grown-up person can tell that we may be sure he knows and what he cannot tell, he does not know.” Can you tell something in such a way that your reader or listener can picture it? The person who knows has first taken the time to stare. “It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus recreate some object that they actually see,” Flannery wrote. I think this is because we often don’t see what we are looking at. We see a thing and mentally group it with other things like it that we have seen. The individual traits of this particular oak tree, as an example, get lost in the mental pile of “Oak Trees” that we have seen. Instead of seeing that particular tree with all its unique idiosyncrasies, we see an amalgamation of all the Oak Trees we have ever seen. We see the tree in front of us, and yet we don’t actually see it at the same time. It’s why one person can say, “All robins look alike,” but another bird watcher can tell the difference between the robins in his back yard. The one has been watching, the other has been paying attention.

“Some Manner of Vital Interest”

We are born with a posture of wonder and eager to delight in the things around us, but over time we stop seeing the marvelous in the ordinary. Life is full of rich, detailed depth, but “familiarity breeds contempt,” as Shakespeare observed. Things become familiar, boring, old and tired. This is something that happens in the writing of fiction as well. Later in the essay, Flannery writes something that I think applies not just to writers but to folks alive in this world:

Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that make you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn’t require his attention.

And to the reader, she writes:

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

It is not the writer concerned with lofty aims and philosophical ideals that writes well, but the one who stares and hopes.³ It is not the reader lost in the stories that has a deeper contact with mystery, but the reader whose sense of reality and of mystery inform each other. The person who can stare at a tree and feel the strangeness of such a creation, or look up at a cloud and marvel that something so huge and heavy should float so easily – this is the person whose sense of mystery is deepened by reality. Nothing is common or beneath their notice. For this person, reality is made concrete even while it is porous and iconic (in the religious sense of the word). Are you alive? Then there is nothing that does not require your attention.

Charlotte Mason said something similar: “Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking – the strain would be too great – but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital [living or lively] interest.” (School Education, p. 170)

We have to make some time to stare, to observe, to practice seeing what is right there in front of our eyes. We have to because we were made to. And as with any skill, the more we practice, the better we will get, the more we will see. The more we see, the more we will live in hope and with a sense of wonder and appreciation for “all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.”

“…every time that a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if his effort produces no visible fruit… There is a real desire when there is an effort of attention. …
Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result,
one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.
Every effort adds a little gold to a treasure no power on earth can take away.”
Simone Weil

Leisure
by W.H. Davies

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

1. The Habit of Being, p. 254, “To Cecil Dawkins” November 17, 1957

2. Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 100

3. “People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience. The lady who only read books that improved her mind was taking a safe course and a hopeless one. She’ll never know whether her mind is improved or not, but should she ever, by some mistake, read a great novel, she’ll know mighty well that something is happening to her.” The Nature and the Aim of Fiction