Amulets Against the Spirits of the Age

1. I have for many years invoked this amulet from a sabbath poem by Wendell Berry. It is perhaps the briefest statement of my philosophy of technology!
“We live the given life, and not the planned.”
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1. I am convinced that the cultivation of attention is one of the essential tasks before us. The 20th century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch has helped bring me to this conclusion. Here is one fragment to that effect:
“I have used the word ‘attention’, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the moral agent.”