"Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be"
About this Quote
Auden sneaks moral accountability into a place most of us treat as unpoliced: the mind. By framing attention as an ethical act - not a neutral flicker of curiosity - he collapses the cozy divide between what we do and what we merely notice. The line works because it refuses the modern alibi that our inner lives are private weather systems, beyond responsibility. For Auden, attention is closer to a vote than a vibe.
The subtext is quietly severe. "To pay attention to this and ignore that" sounds like a simple description of cognition, but Auden makes it a character test: what you habitually look at becomes what you become. He is also warning about the comfort of selective perception - the way people outsource conscience by editing reality, training themselves not to see what would demand action. Ignore suffering long enough and you will eventually lack the inner equipment to respond to it.
Context matters: Auden wrote across the century's ugliest political inventions, when propaganda and mass distraction weren’t abstractions but daily conditions. A poet who watched ideology colonize feeling would be alert to the pre-political battlefield of perception itself. His choice of phrasing is legalistic ("responsible", "accept the consequences"), as if prosecuting the reader for negligence.
It's a bracing claim because it makes interior freedom expensive. You don't get to curate your attention without paying for it later - in empathy, in judgment, in the kind of person who finds certain facts "unthinkable" simply because they've practiced not thinking them.
The subtext is quietly severe. "To pay attention to this and ignore that" sounds like a simple description of cognition, but Auden makes it a character test: what you habitually look at becomes what you become. He is also warning about the comfort of selective perception - the way people outsource conscience by editing reality, training themselves not to see what would demand action. Ignore suffering long enough and you will eventually lack the inner equipment to respond to it.
Context matters: Auden wrote across the century's ugliest political inventions, when propaganda and mass distraction weren’t abstractions but daily conditions. A poet who watched ideology colonize feeling would be alert to the pre-political battlefield of perception itself. His choice of phrasing is legalistic ("responsible", "accept the consequences"), as if prosecuting the reader for negligence.
It's a bracing claim because it makes interior freedom expensive. You don't get to curate your attention without paying for it later - in empathy, in judgment, in the kind of person who finds certain facts "unthinkable" simply because they've practiced not thinking them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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