Backsliding, by Meghan O’Gieblyn
There’s a woman I see each day on my walks along the bike path, a runner who can barely run at all. She has the small, limp forearms of a kangaroo. Her legs are like taffy stretched to the breaking point. There has been a woman like her at every gym I’ve ever belonged to: limbs of ragged sinew, stomachs caving in beneath their sports bras, women who appear determined to burn away their flesh until it’s gone. I see her at different times, morning and evening, and sometimes in the high heat of afternoon, which makes me think she is out running at all hours of the day. Her gait is so constrained by her frailty that her feet hardly leave the ground. It is not a sprint or a jog, but a hobble. For a long time, I looked away when she passed, ashamed for her and embarrassed by my own desire to gape. When I finally saw her up close, I realized she was younger than I’d thought, not much older than myself. I look at her now every time we pass each other and think about how easily a means can become an end. Whatever motive originally spawned her obsession—fitness, beauty, control—has been eaten away by the obsession itself, which has made her weak, grotesque, and imprisoned. Each time we pass, I wait for her to return my gaze, wondering whether the recognition will go both ways. But her eyes are always fixed on the asphalt. She never looks up.
Some people spend their whole lives fighting other people, or institutions, or fate. Then there are those of us whose greatest battles are waged against ourselves. You could argue that we are the lucky ones. There is so much evil and suffering in the world, so much conniving and malicious intent, and the self is, at least, a familiar foe. But ask anyone who has spent years in the grip of an obsession, a self-destructive habit, irrational fears, chronic self-hatred, or a persistent lack of faith whether they would prefer some external adversary and most will assent without hesitation. Those who don’t? They are still under the delusion that they can win.
In a superficial sense, my will is perfectly healthy. Sitting here at my computer, I can, if I wish, lay my hand flat on the desk. I can think fist and my muscles obey. I can compose a sentence in my head and command my fingers to type it, and every word appears on the screen just as it was in my mind. But there are other things that I cannot do no matter how badly I want to and no matter how hard I try. In fact, there seems to be an unwritten law ensuring that the more energy I expend on certain problems, the more likely I am to fail, and it’s precisely those problems that are most important. Or maybe they’ve become important only because I’ve struggled with them for so long.
On the wall above my desk, there is an index card printed with a single sentence from the notebooks of Simone Weil: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” This is the first thing I see when I sit down at my desk each morning; it’s where my eyes land whenever my focus wanders from a book or my computer screen, which is often. I put it on my wall because I did not know what else to pay attention to. I thought that if I stared at it for long enough, its wisdom would enter my soul via osmosis. One day, I would look up and suddenly understand. This hasn’t happened yet.
I first came across the quote, from Gravity and Grace, eighteen months ago, in the midst of a very long and difficult winter. When I think back on that time now, the image that immediately comes to mind is of the blue-and-white tile on our kitchen floor, because it seemed like whenever I tried to do something in the kitchen, like make dinner or pour a cup of coffee, I would end up sitting on the floor, staring at those blue-and-white hexagons through a blur of tears. Over the preceding year, I’d returned to the addiction that had nearly killed me in my twenties and from which I’d been free for more than a decade. It was not what people in recovery communities charitably call a “slip.” I drank for almost a year in secret. I hid it from everyone, including my husband, and confessed only when I was caught. I did not understand why I did this; the eleven years of sobriety had been, by all objective measures, the happiest of my life. I went back to meetings that winter, after I was found out, and said all the things I was supposed to say, that I’d stopped showing up and doing the work, that I’d taken the gift of my life for granted. All of this was true, but it felt strangely false—I heard the falseness in my voice, as though I didn’t buy into my own words. I can see now that it was a problem of authority. I had lost the privilege of narrative distance. I no longer had an “old life” and a “new life”; I had only this muddle of my own making.
The return to alcohol was part of a larger pattern of regression that had begun years earlier, in my late thirties, when I had tried (and failed) to become Catholic. This, too, was a return to something I’d previously renounced. I’d grown up in a fundamentalist family, and lost my faith late, in my early twenties. I knew, in theory, that my attempted conversion would end poorly. I know a lot of things in theory, and none of it seems to be of much help in the trenches of everyday life. I’d written a book partly about leaving the faith, and during the year and a half that I was attending Mass and meeting with a priest, I was still occasionally speaking at colleges and on podcasts about the insidious nature of religious indoctrination and my generation’s mass exodus from the church. I understood on some level that I was suffering from a midlife crisis, and I was disappointed by my lack of imagination. There are a million ways to sabotage one’s life, but I could not seem to come up with anything more original than the things that had ruined my life before: alcohol and institutional religion. The symmetry, in fact, could not have been more perfect. Within the span of a few years, I had returned to the very traps I’d escaped in early adulthood.
Last year, I made my way through Weil’s notebooks, the private spiritual writing she produced during the final years of her life. She often returns to a problem she sometimes calls “retrogression.” How can we persevere through that moment that inevitably arises in any moral pursuit when our will begins to flag, our attention starts to wander, and we backslide into our old ways? The reason this happens, she argues, is “gravity.” Weil believed that the inner life was determined by metaphysical laws that were just as inviolable as natural laws, and she was trying to work out in her notebooks a kind of spiritual physics. She seemed to think that if she could understand these mechanisms, she could hack spiritual growth. Her concept of gravity draws on both East and West, on karma and original sin. It’s a spiritual force that is constantly pulling us downward, toward everything that is earthly and base, which is why the moral life so often feels like an uphill battle. Gravity seeks equilibrium. This is why we crave vengeance: when someone hurts us, we believe they should be hurt, too. It’s why we believe that the moral debts we sustain (the sacrifices we make, the good deeds we perform) should be rewarded with just and equal compensations. And it’s why we are always returning to bad habits, which have their own gravitational pull. Spiritual progress requires fighting against the natural downward inclination of our souls—though fighting, oddly, is also the problem. If we push beyond these natural limits, willing ourselves to continue up the mountain through sheer determination after our motivation has expired, we pay the price with a “terrible fall.”
The people who raised me also used to talk about backsliding, the apathy and moral laxness that crept into a believer’s life after the initial propulsion of conversion lost steam. It would be easy to see my return to alcohol and religion that way—an exhausted capitulation after years of effort, a return to default settings. But that’s not how it felt. What I remember most clearly is the intensity of my desire, the profound longing to lose myself in the rituals of Mass or the stupefied oblivion of a blackout, and the utter conviction that these things were right, even as some part of me must have known they were wrong. These were choices I made willingly, even willfully, though on the bleakest days of the winter I confessed, I saw that I no longer understood what those words meant.
When I happened upon the Weil quote about attention and will, I felt the thrill of recognition that I’ve come to see as the signature of truth, the sense that you are learning for the first time something you have always known. I thought I understood what it meant. But after I put the index card on the wall above my desk and looked at it for many days, I saw that I didn’t understand it at all. Or I grasped only the last part, about the ineffectiveness of the will, which was something I’d known for a long time—not through some mystical Platonic knowledge, but the way I’ve come to know most things in life: through repeated failure.
It’s possible, through sheer effort, to summon cheerfulness but not happiness; piety but not faith; seduction but not love; productivity but not genius. I know from experience that it’s impossible to will oneself out of an addiction. And I know that you cannot force yourself into faith, no matter how hard you pray or starve or grit your teeth. I want very much to live a good and virtuous life, without alcohol and drugs, which have made me miserable. And I still long to believe in God, despite the resounding silence that suggests that He does not exist, or is not interested in us, or in me specifically. But my actions suggest that part of me does not actually want these things—or that I want them only provisionally, or part of the time. My will is scattered, directed toward many contradictory things, and easily distracted.
Is attention the solution? If so, what must I pay attention to?
Occasionally over the years, when I’ve mentioned that I left fundamentalism, or that I gave up drugs and alcohol in my late twenties, someone will remark that I must have a strong will. I understand why they say this—renunciations supposedly require a lot of determination. But it always confuses me, because in both cases, the change was unwanted and happened precisely because my will had failed. I abandoned my faith only after years of trying unsuccessfully to ignore and reason away my doubts. They must have started when I was twelve or thirteen, the age it happens for most people who end up leaving, but I pushed through. I doubted my doubts. I kept taking up more extreme commitments, serving on the mission field in Ecuador and studying theology at one of the oldest and most conservative Bible colleges in the country, an institution that was still buzzing with controversy over its recent decision to allow women to wear pants to class. Everyone I knew believed what I was trying to convince myself to believe—that was part of it. But I also genuinely desired God. I saw how other people’s lives had been transformed, and I wanted mine to be transformed, too. Perhaps my desires were always basically selfish.
Kicking an addiction, years later, was also mostly a matter of failure, which is to say it was the last possible resort after exhausting every attempt to continue drinking without consequences. I worked during those years at a bar near the Chicago Board of Trade. The regulars were middle-aged men who routinely drank five or six cocktails after work and were only rarely sloppy. It was a nice bar. There was a dress code. I poured them their Manhattans and martinis and sipped from the “water” glass of undiluted Grey Goose I kept beside the register, surreptitiously matching them drink for drink. But while they went home each night to their families, watched CNN, and traded crude-oil futures, I went out after work to the 5 am bars and often woke up the next morning in places I had no memory of having gone, with some stranger I had no memory of having met. I sometimes managed to stop for a while by taking up some insanely ambitious project. I once built a queen-size loft bed from instructions I’d found on the internet and adapted to fit the dimensions of my bedroom. It took two solid weeks and required power tools I had never used before, and a lot of Adderall, but it was a good and sturdy bed. It lasted many years and served as a kind of proof of concept, evidence that I could do anything I wanted, so long as I set my mind to it. The problem was that I only wanted to do one thing. When I finally landed in treatment at the age of twenty-eight, I had been living out of my car for several weeks, having lost basically everything and refused the interventions of everyone who’d previously tried to help.
If these two renunciations appeared to be great successes it’s because the story of my life, as I told it for years, conveniently framed them this way. Nietzsche says somewhere that the illusion of willpower rests on our tendency to identify with the part of our soul that commands, not the part that obeys. It’s possible, in fact, that the problem of the will comes down to a problem of language. It’s baffling to me that we use the same word to describe two seemingly contradictory things. On one hand, the will is desire (both will and volition come from root words meaning “wish” or “desire”). On the other hand, the will is necessary only when you need to act against your desires, or overcome them. To say that someone has a strong will means that she desires fiercely. Or it means that she has conquered her desires and is no longer their servant. This contradiction in common usage speaks to a contradiction in the self—the “I” who both wants and wants not to want. What is called weakness of will is not a deficit but a surplus. The person who breaks his diet wishes for two things at once: to eat and to refrain.
This is why willpower does not work when it comes to our most persistent faults: the will is both the problem and the solution to the problem, and to fight will with will is to end up even more entangled. It’s a dilemma, it’s worth noting, that is unique to our species. All animals have desires, but we are, as of yet, the only form of intelligence that is capable of wanting different desires, and I sometimes think that it’s in these struggles against ourselves that we are most stubbornly human.
It’s late summer as I write this, the back end of August. The savory along the river is teeming with bees, and small white moths light among the ghosts of withered bergamot. The days are still sweltering, but dusk comes early and sharp, and the air turns suddenly cold. I sit at my desk, looking out the small dormer window at the shadows yawning across the grass, listening to the low static of cicadas, the death rattle of summer.
“We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” It would be reasonable to assume that I am attracted to this quote because attention seems like an easier path than will. That is not remotely the case. I don’t know how to pay attention. I am not talking about the inability to finish a book or sit through a long academic lecture, which requires only desire and determination. I mean that I consistently find whatever is happening in my mind to be more urgent and absorbing than what is happening in the world. I suffer a great deal from this inclination because, despite the fact that my thoughts appear more interesting and urgent, they are circular, deterministic, and relentlessly self-excoriating. What draws me to Weil’s writing on attention, I think, is the promise of freedom from my own mind.
Weil writes of attention as a way of engaging with the world without the distorting lens of the ego. She longed for an attention “so full that the ‘I’ disappears.” She writes about the virtues of paying attention to beauty, to art, to suffering. Sometimes she insists that we pay attention to “the void.” But the object of attention is ultimately less important than the discipline itself, which is meant to deepen one’s love for goodness and truth, and also to intensify compassion for others. It is an “indirect method,” a way to achieve ends that resist the brute force of will.
In French, attention (l’attention) is cognate with waiting (l’attente), and Weil often speaks of attention as a form of patience. It’s the ability to seek the good and the beautiful even when you hear nothing on the other end of the line but the silence of the void. It’s a willingness to remain at the doorstep of truth without consolation or reward, to ignore the voice that is constantly whispering in your ear that there’s something better around the corner. All my attempts at a spiritual life have failed because I could not remain on that doorstep. I became dazzled by the possibility of learning new things and forgot what I already knew.
The Greeks believed that virtue is simply knowledge, that if you know what is good you will automatically do it. “No one who knows or believes there is something else better than what he is doing, something possible, will go on doing what he had been doing when he could be doing what is better,” Socrates says in Plato’s Protagoras. This idea is totally alien to me—I don’t understand it at all. What I understand is the bewilderment of the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” I understand Duryodhana, the antagonist of the Mahabharata, who says in the Pandava Gita, “I know what is Dharma but [am] not able to practice it, I know what is not Dharma, but I am not able to keep away from it.” I understand the deranged ambivalence in Augustine’s prayer: “Grant me chastity and self-control, but please not yet!”
William James called this the dilemma of the sick soul, which is divided against itself. The problem is not knowledge but will, and the only way a divided will can become unified is through a “crisis of self-surrender,” a moment when the individual stops striving and allows some larger force to transform her. “Give up the feeling of responsibility,” he writes in The Varieties of Religious Experience,
let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.
In the religious community where I was raised, on the shores of Lake Michigan, we gathered on summer evenings in a wooden tabernacle where there was, affixed to the pulpit, a small sign that read let go and let god. It was a relic of the Higher Life movement, a theology that thoroughly infused American evangelicalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was from that pulpit that I heard countless people give their testimonies, a narrative form that hinges on the Jamesian crisis of surrender, the moment when the convert recognizes that he cannot live by his own will and must be transformed by something outside himself, which was commonly known as grace. Is there any concept more beautiful than grace? Its defining characteristic is ease and fluidity. St. Cyprian wrote in the third century that after his baptism everything he’d struggled to do on his own became simple: “Closed doors immediately became open, the darkness became light, what seemed difficult before became easy, what seemed impossible became possible.”
Why am I still fascinated by this idea despite having no metaphysical beliefs to support it? It worked for me once, at twenty-eight. I accepted failure and suddenly, closed doors opened; the impossible became possible. My life finally moved forward. I went back to school, married, and began writing. But I never managed to articulate who or what I was surrendering to, despite wanting very badly to believe in the “higher powers” James alludes to. The recovery meetings I attended were founded on the same higher-life principles as my childhood faith; the clubhouse in my neighborhood also had a sign reading let go and let god. People said I could interpret that last word however I wanted, that it was best to not overthink it. But you really do need both sides of the equation. If you simply “let go,” without any clear destination, you inevitably fall back on the very thing you are trying to escape: yourself.
I have always thought that grace is the opposite of will, and I suppose that I am attracted to Weil’s idea of attention partly because of its similarity to grace. We live in an age that is positively obsessed with attention. You cannot even glance at a screen these days without encountering someone lamenting its decline. But Weil is not talking about “focus.” Attention for her is nearly the opposite. “What could be more stupid,” she asks, “than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem. Attention is something quite different.”
Weil sometimes speaks of attention as a habit, a continual, methodical return to a chosen focal point. She often uses religious rituals as an illustration. The act of focusing intently on an object—a holy name, a mantra, the Eucharist—has the potential to transform a person’s desires. At times, she seems to believe that the object of attention is arbitrary and beside the point. You can achieve enlightenment by reciting the name of the Buddha, or you can receive salvation by professing the name of the Lord. Names, like sacred objects, are merely conventions. What matters is the purity of attention and desire. Even nonreligious subjects, like Latin or geometry, she believed, were able to transform a person, to make her more capable of compassion or more inclined to discern truth. In a 1942 essay, she argues that the sole end of education should be to increase the capacity for attention, which, at its fullest, is identical to prayer.
Weil believed that any religion, when pursued with sincere desire and perfect attention, leads to God, though she would not have assented to the permissive, eclectic spirituality that is popular today. In fact, she insists that it’s necessary to commit oneself to one specific religion, and experience it from the inside, in order to access the truth that transcends it:
We must have given all our attention, all our faith, all our love to a particular religion in order to think of any other religion with the high degree of attention, faith, and love that is proper to it.
This is another idea that recurs in her work: if you pay close attention to one small thing, you will eventually come to understand all conceivable truths.
That is, at least, what I take her to mean. Despite how prolifically she wrote about attention, she does not give much practical advice about how to cultivate it. Her spiritual writing is runic and aphoristic. I don’t really understand it, but I think this is part of its appeal, the sense that it conceals truths that might, if they were fully comprehended, annihilate me. Mysticism promises transformation, but without the transactional logic of self-help, which so often simply exacerbates the problem. Once you grasp a truth in its entirety, it becomes just another instrument of your will.
You cannot understand the meaning of your life while you are still living it. Autobiography is, or should be, an impossible form. Augustine is the father of the genre because he is the one who discovered the crucial loophole: die, then go on living. Renounce your old life, be born again, and voilà, you now have an Archimedean point, a second life on which to stand, from which to narrate your first. It’s this narrative arc, which was canonized in his Confessions and proliferated in the seventeenth-century conversion narratives of the Protestant Dissenters, that still inflects all life writing, religious or secular. Open any memoir, any personal essay, and you will find the same story: I was lost and now I’m found. I was sick and now I’m well. I believed in something, but that belief was hollow. And the person who believed it is dead. I have told this story so often I could tell it in my sleep. I’m doing it again—I never learn.
Autobiography is surely not the most intuitive way to make the “I” disappear. But Weil herself wrote a spiritual autobiography, a short document she included in a letter to a priest she’d befriended. In one passage, she describes how she first discovered the idea of attention. Throughout her adolescence, she’d lived in the shadow of her elder brother, André, who was a true prodigy (at twelve, he was solving problems that stumped doctoral candidates, and had taught himself ancient Greek so that he could read the Iliad in the original). She was fourteen when she finally realized that she did not share his gifts and fell into a despair so severe she contemplated suicide. The most intolerable thought, she recalls, was the possibility that she was barred from the truth that genius alone could access: “I preferred to die rather than live without that truth.” What saved her from suicide was an insight about the value of attention:
After months of inward darkness, I suddenly had the everlasting conviction that any human being, even though practically devoid of natural faculties, can penetrate to the kingdom of truth reserved for genius, if only he longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all his attention upon its attainment.
There is surely some retroactive continuity here, the writer going back in time to spin an origin story about the idea that would become the center of her spiritual writing. But this does not invalidate the idea itself. Weil seems to be saying that truth is not grasped in an instant, but emerges through a long process of cultivated attention, the patient return to an idea, an object, or a text. She wrote in her notebooks that spiritual growth is not a matter of understanding “new things,” but of coming to understand “with our whole self the truths which are evident.” Maybe attention is about coming to understand, with our whole self, what we already know in theory, a way to transform intellectual knowledge into the actionable wisdom of experience.
Iris Murdoch, drawing on Weil’s ideas, agreed that attention is a better method than willpower when it comes to remedying our faults. We often assume that we are free at any moment to make any decision we want. But by the time we find ourselves facing temptation or an ethical dilemma, we’ve already become the kind of person who is destined to make a particular choice. The moral life, writes Murdoch, is not about self-mastery in the crucible of moral struggle. It’s about conditioning our will through continuous acts of attention, turning our minds each day to virtue, so that in decisive moments we are automatically “compelled” in that direction. “If I attend properly,” Murdoch writes, “I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at.” This is what it means for one’s will to be free. It is, granted, a very different kind of freedom from the sort that’s often celebrated: having as many options as possible.
The paradox of the will centers on the problem of desire. I can very often will what I want (I am capable enough), but the wanting itself is not under my control. My desires are fickle and destructive, and once they take hold, they become impossible to resist. Attention, for Weil and for Murdoch, is a way of enlarging one’s desire for good. We find a focal point that appears to contain the good, we look at it, we wait, and over time, if we’re patient, our will becomes aligned with it. I think about the passage from Philippians I memorized as a child:
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
Perhaps this is what I’m doing in reading Weil and returning each day to the quote on my wall. I am not necessarily trying to understand. I am attuning my mind to truth. I am teaching myself, through daily acts of attention, to want it.