How to Be Alive?

Summer Sabbath Series: Embodying Attention Through Art

Nuttall's Lesser Marsh Wren, 1833, Robert Havell, Jr.

The question before me, now that I
am old, is not how to be dead,
which I know from enough practice,
but how to be alive, as these worn
hills still tell, and some paintings
of Paul Cézanne, and this mere
singing wren, who thinks he’s alive
forever, this instant, and may be.

— 2001, VI, Sabbath Poems

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Artists offer us the gift of attention. It is their present to the rest of us, I think, beings whose brains tend to sputter or scatter at the mere thought of presence. Both the poet and the artist lean in to life. They press their noses against the glass of perception, soaking up every detail of what is.

Thus with Wendell Berry’s sabbath poem above, its invitation to sight, reflection, and comparison. In a mere eight lines of text, Wendell challenges the reader with a problem, compares our own habits of perception with three evocative vignettes, and challenges us to a new mode of living. Today, we will unpack each of these things, and learn from them how attention fosters life.