The Art of Divination: D.H. Lawrence on the Power of Pure Attention

“An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer.”

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” Simone Weil observed as she considered the relationship between attention and grace at the peak of her short life. “Attention without feeling,” Mary Oliver wrote a generation later in her beautiful elegy for her soul mate, “is only a report.”

Before Oliver, before Weil, D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) took up the subject of att...