Modern life is full of things competing for our attention, yet genuine attention has become strangely difficult to give. We scroll past photographs without really looking at them, listen to conversations while thinking about the next thing we need to do and move through familiar places without noticing what has changed.
Susan Sontag had a very different prescription for living: look harder, listen longer and remain curious. In a 2003 commencement address at Vassar College, the celebrated writer and intellectual urged graduates not to let routine and obligations shrink their experience of the world. Her advice was energetic rather than solemn: do stuff, be curious, pay attention, and stay eager. The passage has endured because it turns attention from a passive mental function into a way of being alive.
