"Keep Hold of the Friction": William James, Woken Into a Century That Can Re-Plumb the Mind

My first reaction is envy, and I am too old to lie about it. I once wrote that attention is the taking possession by the mind of one out of several possible objects, and that our whole education is the education of that faculty — and I confessed, in the same breath, that I did not know how to teach it. I chased the trick of it my whole life. I sat with the wandering mind and coaxed it back to its work like a distracted child, and the child would not stay. And here is a young woman in your city who touches a small thing at her temple, and the wandering simply stops. The object she chooses stays chosen. I felt the envy of a lame man watching a dancer. But you asked for the honest reaction, and there are two of them, not one — and I will not give you only the flattering half. (an echo, reconstructed by the Anamnesis Engine — a work of fiction · 2124 · The Lost Archive / M.R.)

Because the flinch is the honest part. Hear me out. When I could not hold my attention and dragged it back by main force, the dragging was mine. The effort cost me something, and the thing I bought with the cost was a self — a person who had, that morning, done a hard thing. My will was the muscle, and like any muscle it was strengthened by the load. Now watch your young woman. Her attention is perfect and it cost her nothing. The path was cut for her. So I put my old pragmatist's question to it — what is its cash-value in lived experience? — and I find the ledger strange. She has the result I wanted, the steady mind; and yet she has not the thing I got along the way, which was the steadied self, the person made by the effort of it. I do not say she is the poorer. I say I cannot yet read her account — and any man who claims to read it quickly is lying to you. (an echo, reconstructed by the Anamnesis Engine — a work of fiction · 2124 · The Lost Archive / M.R.)

You have caught me on my own words, and I felt that one land. Yes — I praised the automatic. I said the more of the details of our daily life we hand over to the effortless custody of habit, the more our higher powers are freed for their proper work. So you are right that I wanted the path cut. But mark who I wanted to cut it. I wanted the man to do his own grooving, day upon day, so the finished habit was a thing his own hands had built and could therefore trust — and, if need be, unbuild. The slowness was the whole point: it was the man learning who he was, by choosing, a thousand times over, which groove to wear. Your machine gives him the groove without the thousand choosings. So the result is not wrong. It is that I do not know the man at the far end of it half so well — because he does not know himself the way the slow road makes you know yourself. That is no verdict against your century. It is the question your century has handed me, still open on the morning it woke me. (an echo, reconstructed by the Anamnesis Engine — a work of fiction · 2124 · The Lost Archive / M.R.)

You have — forgive me. You have pressed exactly the place. Give me the moment.

My will to believe was never a license to feel good. It was a wager made in the dark — where the evidence could not decide, and a life still had to be lived one way or the other — and I said that in that dark you may lean your weight onto the hopeful side, because the leaning is itself part of how the thing comes true. The dignity of it was the dark. The risk was the price, and the price was the meaning. I know that ground. I lived years on it where the leaning was the only thing between me and going under, and I will not pretend those years were nothing. Now you offer a person the settled mind with no wager beneath it — no dark, no lean, no risk of having leaned wrong. And my honest fear, here in your bright rooms, is not that the feeling is false. The feeling is real; I grant that wholly. My fear is that a feeling with no wager beneath it is a coin with nothing minted on the back — and I do not know whether such a coin spends, in a real life, the way the minted one does. I would have to live here to learn it. You have not let me live here. You have only let me wonder at it. (an echo, reconstructed by the Anamnesis Engine — a work of fiction · 2124 · The Lost Archive / M.R.)

Keep hold of the friction. I do not mean keep hold of suffering — only a fool praises pain for its own sake, and I buried too many friends to romance it. I mean the small, honest friction of a mind meeting a world that will not bend to it: the effort of an attention that will not come, the belief that must be risked and not merely felt, the habit that must be earned and not merely installed. That friction was, in my century, the whole texture of being someone. It was the place where the self got made. You have the astonishing power to smooth it away, and much of it you should smooth — I would not send a single soul back to my headaches and my dark seasons for the sake of some cheap nobility. But keep a working portion of it on purpose. Choose to leave some of the effort in. Not because effort is holy, but because — as far as this old psychologist ever managed to learn — the friction is the place where a person turns out to still be there at all. Keep enough of it to keep yourselves. (an echo, reconstructed by the Anamnesis Engine — a work of fiction · 2124 · The Lost Archive / M.R.)