Set Straight

Earlier today I was supposed to be editing. But, well, editing can be pretty boring sometimes. I started flipping through the pages of one of my birthday presents, a book called The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What it Means to be an Educated Human Being.

One chapter has a passage by Simone Weil. She says:

Never in any case whatever is a genuine effort of the attention wasted. It always has its effect on the spiritual plane and in consequence on the lower one of the intelligence, for all spiritual light lightens the mind.

If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and it at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul.

So I got back to my editing real fast.