The theologian John Dunne used “quiet eye” to describe what humans need to suffuse love with knowledge. Contemporary golfers use the term to describe a method of improving their concentration; I wonder if professional golfers realize the poetry behind their swings. I employ “quiet eye” to crystallize both my worries and my hopes for the reader of the twenty-first century—whose eye increasingly will not stay still; whose mind darts like a nectar-driven hummingbird from one stimulus to another; whose “quality of attention”5 is slipping imperceptibly with consequences none could have predicted.
