Peripheral Visions

in the range of potential attention—the state of the nation, all the departments and concerns of a corporation or an institution. In politics, as in the tough streets of a city, peripheral vision is essential to survival. Therapists depend on listening and letting their own associations wander, and salespeople learn to recognize out of the corners of their eyes when a purchase might be imminent. Other professions require learned patterns of inattention. Some forms of caretaking require blanking out the awareness of suffering, and waiters often seem to organize their tasks by carefully ignoring customer signals.
    In a democracy it is critical to have leaders who do not become preoccupied by any single concern, particularly by the problem of ensuring reelection. The United States has had one recent president, Ronald Reagan, whose attention was severely limited and who delegated too much, and another, Jimmy Carter, who tried to attend too well and in too much detail to matters that should have been delegated. Specialists insist that their preoccupation is always urgent, always more important than any other, very much like small children, but an effective leader must be a generalist who knows what to ignore—and she or he must catch the changed tone of voice that suggests that complaint and demand are no longer routine. The balance is not easily achieved. Bob Cousy, the famous “playmaker” of the Boston Celtics basketball team, was famous for his peripheral vision, for knowing at all times what was happening everywhere on the court, which allowed him to practice a distinctive kind of leadership, quite different from the style that might be learned from, say, baseball or golf. There is a whole genre of anecdotes about the way particular famous people—Napoleon, say, or Churchill—could attend to multiple tasks and conversations at the same time. Chess masters play many games at once, perhaps as their only refuge from loneliness between tournaments.
    Even as we compete to receive attention or struggle to know where to give it, it remains the elusive prerequisite of all thought and learning, always selective and always based on some implicit theory of relevance, of connection. Patterns of attention and inattention cluster in every setting and are packaged and pummeled into new forms in school and in the workplace. Infants are born with the knowledge that certain things—a soft touch on the cheek that cues the search for the breast, the spacing of two eyes on a contrasting field that centers the universe—are worth attending to. A newborn’s attention starts almost at once to be reshaped by the actual stimuli presented by the environment, becoming an unfolding capacity to search and to learn.
    There is a simultaneous development of the capacity to ignore and discard that continues through childhood. You can sometimes watch a mother shopping or chatting in some public place, absentmindedly emitting a stream of unenforced injunctions and teaching her children not to listen to her: “Bobby, be quiet,” “Bobby, don’t touch that.” Bobby quickly learns to distinguish the tone of an instruction that is likely to be enforced and ignores the others as background noise. That learned skill in not listening is likely to carry over to his response to all the women in his life—or her life, for women too may learn not to accept instructions—or instruction—from women. Inattention is as much a learned skill as attention.
    I probably belong to the last generation that learned to watch television like a play in a theater, totally captivated, unaware of neighbors, chandeliers, or the framing of the stage, looking intently through the wrong end of a telescope and believing in the lives and passions of tiny, distant figures. At the end of a Christmas Day in the early fifties, spent with my father and his wife, one movie after the other, I found myself stiff and battered, overloaded with conflicting emotions. Gradually it dawned on me that no one else was listening as I was, that there was a style of attention to TV that differed from the attention appropriate to a darkened theater. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, with my back to the room, I had failed to notice that behind me on the sofa there was a steady murmur of conversation and comment, drinks and nibbles, comings and goings, an easygoing social flow of which the televised dramas were only one element.
    I suspect that children today learn to maintain a secret