Thoreau's Axe - by Caleb Smith

About the Book

"When did the age of distraction begin? It might seem like a new problem, a symptom of our digital addictions, but distraction was already a source of deep concern in American culture two hundred years ago. As the industrial market economy emerged, nineteenth-century observers saw the signs: Workers were wasting time, daydreaming on the job, and the public's attention was overstimulated by new media and consumer trends. In response, social reformers designed innovative systems of moral training for the masses. Religious leaders organized far-reaching Christian revivals. And spiritual seekers like Henry David Thoreau experimented on themselves, practicing regimens of simplified living and transcendental mysticism. From the solitary confinement cells of the earliest penitentiaries to the shores of Walden Pond, disciplines of attention became the spiritual exercises of a distracted age. Through twenty-eight short passages on reform, religion, and literature from the strange and beautiful archives of this nineteenth-century attention revival, Caleb Smith reads with an eye for both language and power. Disciplines of attention, he argues, often reinforce a morally conservative social order. At the same time, exercising more careful control over our own attention promises to give us some distance from the consumer marketplace-and, today, from the algorithmic manipulations of the online attention economy. Smith writes with vigilance about the history of coercion, but also with guarded hope about practices of attention, including reading itself. From the benefits of attentive reading to the darker side of enforced attention in prisons and reformatories, this book examines distraction as a moral, political, and economic problem with a long and illuminating history"--

Book Synopsis

How nineteenth-century "disciplines of attention" anticipated the contemporary concern with mindfulness and being "spiritual but not religious"

Today, we're driven to distraction, our attention overwhelmed by the many demands upon it--most of which emanate from our beeping and blinking digital devices. This may seem like a decidedly twenty-first-century problem, but, as Caleb Smith shows in this elegantly written, meditative work, distraction was also a serious concern in American culture two centuries ago. In Thoreau's Axe, Smith explores the strange, beautiful archives of the nineteenth-century attention revival--from a Protestant minister's warning against frivolous thoughts to Thoreau's reflections on wakefulness at Walden Pond. Smith examines how Americans came to embrace attention, mindfulness, and other ways of being "spiritual but not religious," and how older Christian ideas about temptation and spiritual devotion endure in our modern ideas about distraction and attention.

Smith explains that nineteenth-century worries over attention developed in response to what were seen as the damaging mental effects of new technologies and economic systems. A "wandering mind," once diagnosed, was in need of therapy or rehabilitation. Modeling his text after nineteenth-century books of devotion, Smith offers close readings of twenty-eight short passages about attention. Considering social reformers who designed moral training for the masses, religious leaders who organized Christian revivals, and spiritual seekers like Thoreau who experimented with regimens of simplified living and transcendental mysticism, Smith shows how disciplines of attention became the spiritual exercises of a distracted age.

Review Quotes

"Smith's book has the merit of showing a meaningful continuity not only between our time and Thoreau's, but also between Thoreau and like-minded thinkers of his century."---Costica Bradatan, Times Literary Supplement

"[An] elegant anthology of American anxieties over attention."---Michael Ledger-Lomas, The Spectator

"A fascinating meditation on 'the "infinite bustle" of modern life.'"---Robert M. Thorson, Wall Street Journal

"Original and impactful. . . . Smith shows the price we pay for remaining distracted, the challenge of cultivating responsible and impactful disciplines of attention amidst capitalistic structures, and the corresponding need to always remember to look beyond the self."---Morgan Shipley, Review19

"Thoreau's Axe [is] a work structured like a book of devotion, offering twenty-eight 'readings' that traverse two centuries of discourse on attention, and how various figures, from poets to preachers to reformers, have attempted to inculcate it. . . . [Smith] has the deep and natural orientation of a historian, in his approach to archives and strange and curious corners of nineteenth-century American thought."---Rachel Kushner, Harper's

"[A] fascinating book. . . . Smith's analyses are incisive and well researched. . . . Collectively they form an intriguing study of the moral framework around distraction and attention during this period."-- "Choice Reviews"

"Smith's examples of attention being demanded rather than sought forces the reader to consider more carefully the goal of cultivating attention, and who benefits from such attention."---Shira Telushkin, Plough Quarterly

"Much of Thoreau's Axe cuts deeply into American culture, revealing how discipline and punishment, often wielded from above, have defined for us the proper objects of attention: God, country, race, and the capitalist grind. But the blade of Smith's analysis is subtle, and what I find most remarkable about Thoreau's Axe is Smith's comfort with ambiguity, the apparent ease with which he makes space for contradiction, the degree to which his method depends on it."---Daegan Miller, Yale Review

"Anxieties over attention and distraction are nothing new but also, and more to the point, [Smith] raises an enduring cultural contradiction: like Thoreau, many of us feel distracted by shifts and accelerations in collective life--by new media, to be sure, but also by capitalism and its myriad crises--and yet, to combat these collective distractions, we turn inward and desperately try to become more disciplined, attentive individuals. . . . Smith is not the first to name this tension, though his 'genealogy of distraction and the disciplines of attention' might be the first to unearth its deep cultural roots."---Chelsea Fitzgerald, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Thoughtful and well-written."---Alan Dent, The Penniless Press

"Smith's historicization of what he calls 'disciplines of attention' offers a useful check on reactionary nostalgia. Taking the measure of the distractions of the digital present requires caution."---Len Gutkin, Chronicle Review

"A fascinating new book."---Craig Fehrman, Boston Globe

"With a colloquial tone, Smith makes a solid case that the contemporary take on distraction. . . is an old one that came about in the 19th century. . . . The result is a rousing academic study on the meanings of mindfulness."-- "Publishers Weekly"

About the Author

Caleb Smith is professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of The Prison and the American Imagination and The Oracle and the Curse and the editor of The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, and other publications.