LETTER TO AN ASPIRING INTELLECTUAL by Paul J. Griffiths

LETTER TO AN ASPIRING INTELLECTUAL by Paul J. Griffiths, First Things, May 2018.

"As you learn to cultivate attention over time, you’ll find that your first-personal sense of being the one who is attending will become attenuated. You’ll become filled with and conformed to what you’re attending to, and for one so filled, there’s little room for self-awareness, much less self-congratulation. This conformity to what you’re attending to is boredom’s principal cure, for boredom’s principal characteristic is exactly an excessive self-presence. Close and repeated attention to one or another aspect of the world, which is what an intellectual does, is its cure."

"Among these, intentionally engaging in repetitive activity is important. Practicing a musical instrument, attending Mass daily, meditating on the rhythms of your breath, taking the same walk every day (Kant in Königsberg)—all these can foster attentiveness to particulars if you do them with that in mind. They can help you see that every particular is inexhaustible, and that boredom’s need for distraction is, at bottom, an inability to attend to what’s in front of you."