On the paradox of willpower
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?
