On Attention and Its Costs

We met in a house that belonged to none of us — a rented place outside Charlottesville with a screened porch that looked onto a field gone to thistle. Dillard had arrived first and was already sitting on the porch when I got there, watching something in the grass with the kind of stillness that made me feel, immediately, like I’d been crashing through life without seeing any of it.

Gay drove up twenty minutes later. She came through the screen door with a glass of water she’d found in the kitchen and sat in the rocker with the broken slat, and did not comment on the broken slat. I liked her for that. Dillard was still watching the field.

“There’s a kestrel,” Dillard said. “It’s been working that far edge for ten minutes. American kestrel — smallest North American falcon. It hunts by hovering. Remarkable expenditure of energy for what it catches. Grasshoppers, mostly.”

Gay looked out at the field. “I can’t see it.”

“Southeast corner. Where the fence post is listing.”

“I see the fence post.” Gay drank her water. “What are we doing here?”

I said something about wanting to think through what a personal essay could look like if it tried to hold both of their sensibilities — Gay’s directness about the body, about politics, about the personal as always already political, and Dillard’s attention to the physical world as a kind of discipline, maybe even a spiritual practice. Gay’s Bad Feminist and Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk. Two books that, on the surface, have almost nothing to do with each other.

“They don’t have nothing to do with each other,” Dillard said, still watching the field. “They’re both about paying attention. The difference is what you think attention is for.”

“What I think attention is for,” Gay said, “is evidence. You look at something closely enough, you can’t pretend it isn’t happening. That’s the function of the personal essay — to refuse the comfortable distance. To say: I was there, this happened to my body, and the fact of my body in that situation is an argument.”

“And what I think attention is for,” Dillard said, “is something else entirely. Or maybe not entirely. I think attention is a form of prayer. I think when you look at a cedar tree long enough, you see something you can’t account for. Not God, necessarily. But something.”

“Prayer.” Gay let the word sit in the air. Not dismissive, exactly, but not embracing it either.

“Don’t dismiss it yet,” Dillard said. “I’m not talking about church. I’m talking about the fact that if you sit still in one place for long enough, the world does something to you. It enters you. That’s not mysticism — it’s neuroscience, probably, though I couldn’t care less about the neuroscience.”

I said I thought the tension between their positions was exactly what I wanted the essay to hold. Gay’s insistence that looking is never innocent, that the act of observation is shaped by who you are and what your body has been through. Dillard’s insistence that looking can crack you open to something beyond yourself. Both demanding attention, but disagreeing about what attention delivers.

Gay shifted in the rocker. “Here’s my problem with the Dillard approach, and I mean this with genuine respect, because Pilgrim at Tinker Creek changed how I thought about sentences when I was twenty-two. The problem is: who gets to sit still? Who gets to watch a kestrel for ten minutes without wondering if someone is going to call the police on them for being in the wrong field? The contemplative tradition assumes a body that is safe. That is not harassed. That has leisure.”

Dillard turned from the field for the first time. Her eyes were sharp. “That’s a real objection. But I’d push back on ‘assumes.’ I’ve written from places of genuine physical danger — the Galápagos, the Arctic, a hospital bed. The attention I’m talking about isn’t leisure. It’s discipline. It’s closer to what a surgeon does than what a vacationer does.”

“But the surgeon goes home,” Gay said.

“Everyone goes home. Or doesn’t. That’s not the point.”

“It is the point. It’s the whole point. Whether you get to go home, and what home looks like, and whether home is a place your body can rest — that’s what a personal essay has to account for. Otherwise you’re writing nature poetry, which is fine, but it isn’t what we’re here to do.”

I was quiet for a while. They were both right in ways that didn’t cancel each other out, and I was trying to figure out how an essay could hold both claims without resolving them into some tidy synthesis. Gay’s insistence on the political body. Dillard’s insistence on the perceiving eye. What if the essay was about a moment when both were true simultaneously — when the narrator’s body was in a situation that was both politically legible and perceptually overwhelming?

“Give me a specific situation,” Dillard said. “Not a concept. A place.”

I tried one: a woman sitting in a waiting room at a county health clinic. She’s been there for four hours. The waiting room has a window that looks onto a parking lot, and beyond the parking lot, a stand of tulip poplars. She has been watching the trees because there is nothing else to do, and over the course of four hours, the light has changed, and she has started to actually see them — their bark, which is fissured in a way she’d never noticed, the way the leaves turn in wind that she can see but not feel through the glass. And at the same time, she is sitting in that waiting room because of a system that has decided how long her time is worth, and her back hurts from the plastic chair, and the form she filled out asked questions about her body that felt like an interrogation.

“Now you have something,” Dillard said.

“Maybe,” Gay said. “But don’t let the trees redeem the waiting. That’s the trap. The temptation is to write the essay so that the beauty of the tulip poplars compensates for the indignity of the wait. Nature as consolation. I’ve read a thousand essays that do that, and they’re all lies.”

“They’re not all lies,” Dillard said. “Some of them are true.”

“Some of them are true for people whose suffering is minor enough to be consoled by a tree.”

Dillard laughed — a short, hard sound. “You think suffering is competitive?”

“I think essays about suffering are. I think the personal essay has a hierarchy, and the people at the bottom of it are the ones who write about looking at birds while the world burns, and the people at the top are the ones who write about the burning, and I think that hierarchy is stupid but also that I participate in it, and that bothers me.”

“It should bother you,” Dillard said. “Hierarchies of suffering are always corrupt. But here’s what I’d say: the burning and the bird are the same event. Not metaphorically. Actually. The kestrel out there is hunting in a field that used to be someone’s farm. That farm failed because of specific economic policies. The thistle grew in because nobody mowed. The kestrel moved into the thistle because kestrels follow grasshoppers, and grasshoppers follow thistle. The bird is a record of policy failure. But it’s also a bird. And if you can’t hold both of those, you’re not paying enough attention.”

That was the first moment when I felt something click — not a resolution, but a possibility. An essay that refuses to separate the political from the perceptual. Where the narrator is looking at something with Dillard’s intensity of gaze and simultaneously experiencing Gay’s awareness that the looking itself is conditioned by power, by the body, by who gets to sit where.

“I still don’t want redemption,” Gay said. “I need to be clear about that. I don’t want the essay to end with the narrator feeling better because she saw a beautiful thing. That’s cheap grace.”

“Agreed,” Dillard said, which surprised me. “The worst thing you can do with attention is use it for comfort. Attention should make you more uncomfortable, not less. That’s how you know you’re actually doing it.”

“Okay,” Gay said. “Okay. If we agree on that, we agree on something.”

I asked about the essay’s voice — how to blend Gay’s conversational directness, the way her sentences can pivot from vulnerable to analytical in the space of a comma, with Dillard’s precision, her willingness to spend a paragraph on the exact color of a particular lichen.

“Don’t blend,” Gay said. “That’s a mistake. Blending is beige. Instead, let the essay shift registers. There will be passages that are close to the body, close to the narrator’s experience of waiting and being made to wait, and those should sound like me — first person, unapologetic, willing to be angry. And there will be passages that are close to the world outside the window, the actual physical phenomena, and those should sound like Annie — precise, awed, willing to be patient with a single image.”

“And the shifts should be jarring,” Dillard added. “Not smooth. Readers should feel the gear change. Because in life, you do. You’re looking at a tree and then you remember you’re hungry and angry and your back hurts and the receptionist called you ‘sweetie.’ The essay should honor both modes by not pretending they’re compatible.”

“They’re not compatible,” Gay said. “That’s the essay.”

“They might be compatible,” Dillard said. “But you’d have to live differently to find out. And none of us live that differently.”

I brought up something that had been bothering me: the risk of the essay becoming an argument for attention as a practice, as though the narrator were prescribing mindfulness. The wellness-ification of looking. I’d read too many essays that turned Dillard’s genuine perceptual rigor into a kind of self-help.

“I’d burn those essays,” Dillard said. “What I’m talking about has nothing to do with wellness. Wellness is comfort. Attention is the opposite. When you really look at something — a praying mantis eating a butterfly, a creek flooding its banks — it’s violent. The world is violent and beautiful and neither of those adjectives wins.”

Gay nodded. “And when you really look at a political situation — really, with your own body as evidence — it’s the same. It’s violent and it’s complicated and you’re implicated in it. The personal essay that works is the one that implicates the writer. I never trust an essay where the author comes out clean.”

“So our narrator should come out dirty,” I said.

“Our narrator should come out seeing more, and enjoying it less,” Dillard said.

“Our narrator should come out having said something she wasn’t supposed to say,” Gay said.

The kestrel had moved to a different part of the field, or maybe it was a different bird. Dillard was watching it again. Gay was looking at her phone, then put it away with what seemed like a deliberate choice. The light was going amber through the thistle, and I was thinking about the essay, about a narrator who sits in a plastic chair and looks out a window and refuses to let what she sees console her, but also refuses to stop seeing it.

“One more thing,” Gay said. “The body. The narrator’s body has to be in the essay. Not as a metaphor. Not as a symbol. As a body. With mass and discomfort and history. You cannot write a personal essay without a body. I’ve read too many disembodied essays that are all eyeball and no flesh.”

“I agree,” Dillard said. “Though I’d say it differently. I’d say the narrator’s body is the instrument of perception. You don’t see with your mind. You see with your corneas and your rods and your cones and your optic nerve, and those are physical objects that can be damaged. Attention is bodily. It starts in the meat.”

“It starts in the meat,” Gay repeated. “I wouldn’t have said it that way, but yes.”

“You would have said it better,” Dillard said.

“I would have said it angrier.”

The conversation drifted after that into territory that felt less productive — Dillard talking about a wasp nest she’d found in the eaves of a house she rented in 1975, Gay talking about an essay she’d abandoned about airport chairs, me trying to connect the two and failing. But the failure felt useful. Not everything in a conversation earns its keep, and the willingness to let a thread drop is as important as the willingness to follow one.

We never agreed on what the essay was about. Gay thought it was about the politics of waiting. Dillard thought it was about what you see when you’re forced to stop. I thought it was about both, which they both told me was a cop-out.

“Pick one,” Gay said.

“You can’t pick one,” Dillard said.

They looked at each other and something passed between them — not agreement, but recognition. Two writers who’d spent decades insisting on different versions of the same imperative: look. Don’t look away. And then write down what you saw, even when — especially when — it didn’t comfort you.

I drove back to the highway as the sun went down, thinking about tulip poplars and plastic chairs and the kestrel’s expenditure of energy for what it catches.