i asked for it and it arrived whole, in the time it took to type the request. and the thing i keep sitting with is not the result. it is the speed. the way the entire middle of making, the slow part, the part where you stare and start over and sit in the not-knowing, had simply been removed, and something finished was handed across the gap where that used to be.
simone weil wrote, in a letter to a friend, that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. she meant it almost literally. to truly attend to something, to hold it in your mind without rushing to use it or judge it or move past it, is to give it the one thing you cannot fake or mass produce, which is your presence. elsewhere she went further and said attention at its highest is the same thing as prayer. she thought it was the root of love and of knowledge both, and that hardly anyone does it, because it is so much harder than it sounds to simply stay with a thing.
what i had not understood until lately is more specific than the usual praise of slow work. the friction was not valuable because it was hard. effort is not the same as attention, and plenty of laborious things are done with none of it. the friction mattered because the making could not proceed without you. each step needed a judgment only you could supply, this word and not that one, this line a half-degree truer than the last, and so the task held you there by structure, not by difficulty. you could not make the thing while absent, because the next move would not arrive unless you attended enough to make it. take it out and the work simply stopped.
generation takes out exactly that. it hands you the finished thing without needing the judgments along the way, which means it asks for none of the presence the making used to require. there is a lazy version of this thought that i do not believe. the lazy version says what comes quickly is therefore empty. that is not true, and it is a little snobbish, and benjamin saw the other side of it nearly a century ago. he wrote about the aura the original has and the copy loses, but he was not mourning the past, he saw plainly that when art comes loose from its single original it also reaches more people and belongs to more hands. the loosening opens things. it is not only loss.
so the loss is not in the output but in us, and it is quieter. when the work no longer requires your attention, the attention does not vanish, it just stops being compelled. it becomes optional. and an optional faculty is one you can lose without noticing, the way a language you stop speaking leaves you a little at a time, still there if you reach for it, until the day you reach and it is gone. the task used to keep the muscle in use. now only you can.
and that is the part i have made a kind of peace with. the friction that used to hold me there is gone, and what is left in its place is plainer and somehow heavier: a quiet room, the thing in front of me, no deadline and no difficulty forcing my eyes to stay, and the choice, entirely mine now, to keep looking anyway. weil would have said it was always that choice. i only feel the weight of it now, because nothing else carries it for me anymore.