Slowness and Delight: Learning from Weil in the First-Year University English Classroom
On the first day of a new term, I walk into a silent classroom. Most of the students gaze into their screens. I have 12 weeks to introduce them to poetry and composition, but my first task is to remind them that we are here: embodied creatures, together in a place, with certain opportunities and obligations. I encourage everyone to put their devices away and trust the slow process of taking notes by hand. I introduce myself, not just my credentials but my life beyond these college walls, then ask them to introduce themselves and to tell us their favorite pizza topping. I don’t say so, but neuroscientific studies suggest imagining a stranger’s favorite vegetables helps move them from category of “other” to a closer sense of shared humanity. I figure pizza preferences probably work, too.
We are working our way up to “What are you going through?” or “What grieves you?” (SS, 231), but we can’t rush. There are no shortcuts here.
Simone Weil is sitting on my shoulder. I mean her spirit, her ethos, her intense curiosity and delight. I have read “Reflections on the Right [or Good, in the newest translation] Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” probably two dozen times, at least, and every time it sinks further into my teacherly instincts. With Weil, I’m convinced that attention, understood as a kind of humble, receptive “waiting for truth” (230), is at the heart of learning. This kind of open, patient curiosity requires enormous courage and is also at the heart of prayer (225) and ethical responsiveness to others who suffer (229). I think Weil is right that we can exercise and enlarge this capacity of attention through our academic endeavors, with ramifications for our spiritual and ethical lives.
I also know, with Weil, that attention—to neighbor, to God, to a poem—is “very rare, very difficult”: perhaps even “a miracle” (231). Radically open receptivity is “much more difficult” (229) than the “muscular effort” (228) we often associate with studying. And in our era, the challenges are amplified by algorithmically driven 24/7 digital connections, which many commentators have argued fracture our attention, ratchet up our anxieties, and isolate us still further in our differences from each other.
Thus, my goals in the class are both grandiose and minute: I want my students to learn to encounter the poems before them—and the peers around them—with an openness that lets them truly see and hear. In a culture of rush and fragmentation, I want them to slow down and experience something like ease. In a context of pressured efficiency and a tendency to jump to judgments, I want them to sit in the discomfort of uncertainty and learn to trust their curiosity.
The goals require concrete practices. I teach a lot of reading-heavy classes—including seminars on Weil herself—but in my first-year courses, which combine composition and literature, I’ve learned over the years to assign less reading, which helps ease the pressure to “rush hurriedly” (229). I want students to learn the pleasures of inefficiency, the way it lets you breathe a little, that way it opens up new insights. Indeed, I want them to remember the “pleasure and joy,” even “desire,” that I suspect they once associated with learning, because I know with Weil that “the joy of learning is as essential in studies as breathing is for runners” (228).
To this end, in a course that focuses on narrative, I’ve assigned the same short book to be read at the start and end of the term, which at first baffled the class, but which absolutely improved their understanding of the text and of the gift of repetition. In my composition and poetry class, I assign between five and seven poems a week, almost none of them long (I make an exception for Ross Gay’s glorious “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude,” which is its own primer in attention). Students are required to annotate these poems by hand, but I grade these annotations on effort and completion, not skill, to emphasize process over product. Many students use colorful pens and highlighters for their annotations, returning to some of the pleasures of much earlier years in their education.
In class, we read the poems again. I regularly have students gather into small groups, introducing themselves to each other until they know their peers’ names and reading the poems aloud to each other, annotating them still further. Returning to full-class discussion, we might read the poem aloud once more, phrase by phrase. I mark projections on the whiteboard, cheering on my students’ insights, telling them openly when they’ve suggested an interpretation I hadn’t thought of before, learning alongside them. I do not hide my own delight.
By the end of the term, I see a significant improvement in most students’ close reading skills, which is to say, their capacity for attention. And when I walk into the room, it’s noisy: they’re talking to each other. Usually, a few students have started writing poems of their own, and they shyly show me their sonnets or free verse. By most assessments, these poems are not very good, but they are deeply good in that they are showing a kind of engagement that is rooted in desire.
Let me be very clear: students still cheat—the siren song of generative AI is louder every day. Students still fail. Students get sick; students panic in exams; students quit coming and don’t answer emails. I hold our miniscule successes gently, always aware that there are forces at work that far exceed the counterbalances of my classroom. Most of my students attend university while also holding paid employment, many working near full time. I can’t blame them for a sense that there is no time to waste (or wait). Many of these students view education as a commodity that opens a path to future security in an increasingly unstable world, and my instruction as a service for which they are the always-right customer. But these ideas did not spring up in my students’ minds ex nihilo. Again, they inhabit an entire social structure that pressures them toward hurry, distraction, self-absorption, and fear.
And of course, Weil’s essay offers its own risks and challenges. As I’ve written about at length elsewhere, an ethic of humility, “available, open, and penetrable” (229), can be radically corrective in a solipsistic culture, but its implicit gendering can also recapitulate unjust power imbalances. This double-risk extends to Weil’s impassioned vision of religion: her opening assertion that academic study be carried out in order to strengthen the habit of attention that undergirds prayer—“for this end and for this end only” (225)—is not a point I emphasize in my courses. While I am, in fact, teaching at a Catholic college federated with a public university, few of my students arrive in my classroom intending to pray. While I am, in fact, a person of faith, I am acutely aware of the harms wrought in Christ’s name and the way these harms have touched my students’ lives, including through the local legacies of church-run residential schools that stole Indigenous children from their families and violently uprooted their culture.
But of course, Weil herself was acutely aware of similar harms, and the end of her essay makes an abrupt turn when she notes: “For an adolescent capable of grasping this truth, and generous enough to desire this fruit in preference to all others, his studies would have the fullness of their spiritual efficacy even apart from any religious belief.” (232). The most obvious antecedent to “this truth” and “this fruit” is the discussion of the ethical outcome—the “miracle” of being able to ask another who is radically suffering: “What grieves you?” (231). By the end of her essay, I think Weil moves toward a conclusion—echoed in her other work—that the desire to love our neighbors is just as potent as a desire to love the Good some of us call God.
So, my stance, with Weil, is never triumph but a mustard-seed kind of hope. A few summers ago, I received an email from two former students out of the blue. They told me that they had both been deeply lonely in university and found themselves in one of my classes. When I asked the students to work together, introducing themselves to each other, reading the texts closely together, they felt at first resistant and uncomfortable. However, over time, the proximity bloomed into a friendship—a true, thriving, mutually sustaining love. They wrote to tell me this story and to thank me for the lessons that eventually led them each to ask each other, when they needed it, “What grieves you?” They wrote, they said, to ask me to keep inviting students into these practices of attention, because while it took them a while to see it, they had received a precious gift.
Bio Statement
Cynthia R. Wallace is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Irene and Doug Schmeiser Centre for Faith, Reason, Peace, and Justice at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan. She is author of the books The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion (Columbia UP, 2024) and Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering (Columbia UP, 2016).
Source
Simone Weil, Basic Writings, ed. & trans. by D.K. Levy & Marina Barabas (New York: Routledge, 2024) (the translated quotes used in the text above re Weil’s “Reflections” essay are taken from this book).
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