"There is a state that precedes attention, a desire or need that makes it possible. Thinking of the ways that I look at art or listen to music, I easily distinguish between the dutiful and the avid. In front of the battle scene, the mythological set piece, I make myself pay a certain kind of attention. I take in the shapes and colors, obey the visual indicators that guide my eye from one point to another; I know to make myself mindful of the narrative, its thematic intention. I can even experience certain satisfactions, noting and feeling the balance of elements, the accuracy of execution, the expressiveness of certain gestures and features. All of this betokens one kind of attention. But I am not at attention. I do not engage out of my own inclinations so much as obey a series of basic directives, much as when I read a novel that is solidly characterized and plotted but that, for whatever reason, does not have me in its thrall.

"Other works – certain paintings, novels, pieces of music – activate a completely different set of responses. When I move into the vicinity of a canvas by the seventeeth-century Dutch artist Jacob van Ruisdael, for example, even before I have looked, when I have seen only enough in my peripheral vision to suggest that it is one of his, I experience what feels like an inclining toward; I ready myself to attend. I feel myself heightened in a Ruisdael way – which is different from a Vermeer way or a Giacometti way. It's as if I dilate my pupils to absorb the particular color tones, the marks that are his way of drawing trees, the strategies he uses to create distance in his landscapes. I am looking, moving my eye from point to point, sweeping along the width and breadth of the surface, but what I am attending to is more general, deeper, and hardly requires the verification of intensive looking. The paintings I love induce reverie. With Ruisdael it's easy: I draw the landscape fully around me. I suck it into myself, so that I might absent myself from whatever daylight spot I occupy in whatever gallery or museum. I am tantalized by its tones, the strokes of execution, but also by its profound pastness. Not its particular century or period, simply that it is a version of a bygone world.

"Here attention meets distraction or, better yet, daydreaming. They are not the same thing. One is the special curse of our age – the self-diluted and thinned to a blur by all the vying signals – while the other harks back to childhood, seems the very emblem of the soul's freedom. Distraction is a shearing away from focus, a lowering of intensity, whereas daydreaming – the word itself conveys immersed intensity. Associational, intransitive: the attending mind is bathed in duration. We have no sense of the clock face; we are fully absorbed by our thoughts, images, and scenarios. Daydreaming is closer to our experience of art.

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. I keep coming back to this – it chafes. The more so as I don't think of myself as a believer, even as I grant that being is a mystery beyond all reason. The word prayer – I had to look it up – has a Proto-Indo-European origin. It is a fervent plea to God; it is an expression of helplessness, a putting of oneself before a superior force; it is an expression of thanks, of gratitude, to God or an object of worship. However the action is defined, it involves a wanting or needing. Modifying {Simone] Weil, I would say that attention is not a neutral focus of awareness on some object or event, but is rather an absence looking to be addressed – it is, in most basic terms, a question looking for an answer. There is a big difference between our attempting to pay attention to something and having our attention captured – arrested – by something. That capture is what interests me."