Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture

Yale English professor Smith (The Prison and the American Imagination) offers a solid treatise on attention and distraction in American culture. Focusing on late 18th- and 19th-century American discourse, Smith wonders “what kind of problem is distraction, and how did we come to care so much about attention?” Adapting “an old religious genre, the book of devotion,” which combines “brief excerpts” and “the author’s own meditations,” Smith provides a wide range of close-readings and easily digestible musings on Herman Melville’s depiction in Moby-Dick of the dissociation that comes with labor; Edgar Allan Poe’s description of a narrator with “an attention surplus” in the story “Berenice”; Emily Dickinson’s practice of the “discipline of attention” in her poetry; and more. With a colloquial tone, Smith makes a solid case that the contemporary take on distraction, in which “we adjust our consumption habits, or we make efforts to ensure that our leisure time is quality time, spent mindfully,” is an old one that came about in the 19th century. Smith poignantly queries the enduring notion that distraction can be fought with “personal, moral remedies”: “The real question is whether disciplines of attention can be linked up with programs for economic and social—not just personal—transformation.” The result is a rousing academic study on the meanings of mindfulness. (Jan.)