“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things,”Henry David Thoreau writes inWalden (1854). In the century and a half since Thoreau withdrew to the Massachusetts woods, his thinking about modernity and mental life has become our common sense. Newmachines of work and play, so the story goes, are destroying our capacity to pay attention.We are always in touch but never really intimate, always moving but never in a natural rhythm. “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” (W, p. 90). In his makeshift hermitage, Thoreau devised a therapy for himself, a secular asceticism to cultivate a higher wakefulness. When he walked in the countryside, he practiced what he called “the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen” (W, p. 108). When he read the classics, he devoted himself to “a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object” (W, p. 99). Like him, the distracted today turn to disciplines of attention, adapting the religious practices of older or distant societies to new situations that seem to have little to do with ritual or faith. Mindfulness training, transcendental meditation, regimens to sharpen our focus and extend our concentration—these are the spiritual exercises of our secular age. In the far-reaching program for the diagnosis and treatment of distraction, the critical humanities play their special part. After the triumphof newer media, under the empire of spectacle, the mode of attention associated with the study of paintings and books is said to enter a crisis. “This destruction of attention is disindividuation,” Bernard Stiegler writes, thinking of the

中文翻译：

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世俗时代的注意纪律

“我们的发明通常是漂亮的玩具，它们会分散我们对严肃事物的注意力，”亨利·大卫·梭罗在瓦尔登湖 (1854) 中写道。自梭罗退居马萨诸塞州森林以来的一个半世纪以来，他对现代性和精神生活的思考已成为我们的常识。据说，工作和娱乐的新机器正在摧毁我们集中注意力的能力。我们总是保持联系但从未真正亲密，总是在移动但从未以自然的节奏。“我们为什么要过着如此匆忙和浪费的生活？” （W，第 90 页）。在他的临时隐居处，梭罗为自己设计了一种疗法，一种世俗的禁欲主义来培养更高的觉醒。当他在乡下散步时，他实践了他所谓的“始终观察所见之物的纪律”（W, p. 108）。当他阅读经典时，他致力于“像运动员所经历的那样的训练，几乎毕生都致力于这个目标”（W, p. 99）。像他一样，今天分心的人转向注意力的训练，使古老或遥远社会的宗教习俗适应似乎与仪式或信仰无关的新情况。正念训练、超然冥想、提高注意力和集中注意力的养生法——这些都是我们世俗时代的精神锻炼。在影响深远的分心诊断和治疗计划中，批判性人文学科发挥着特殊的作用。新媒体大获全胜后，在奇观帝国下，与书画研究相关的注意力模式据说进入了危机。“这种注意力的破坏是去个体化，