bea cresp
Up until about a month ago I punished myself every time I was distracted and noticed it. Aware of my talent to run away from the site I was working on at the first opportunity, triggered by anything, a noise from the street, a reminder of the future, an imaginary call on the switched off cellphone, and spent a good one time amount of allegations: what are you doing; What a waste of time; Bravo, boy, you’re losing concentration more and more… But since I got my hands on it and read Italian professor Alessandra Aloisi’s essay The Power of Distraction in one go, I’m much calmer and don’t feel guilty turn . Not that I celebrate every one of my dalliances, but somehow I’ve started to see the bright side of it and have started to disagree with the 17th-century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, who for years had liked me very much and believed was right, when he said that all man’s misfortunes stem from his inability to keep still in his room. Pascal called distraction divertissement, but not as the divertimento we know, but in its etymological sense, since it comes from divertere (to look away, to follow a different direction). Pascal can’t stand it when we get distracted. According to him, one must think well, think seriously; That is, contemplating the idea of God without leaving home and achieving a state of serenity and well-being. He dares to deny Montaigne, who sees divertissement as something of entertainment and something ethical that does not touch on transcendent values of good and evil. Montaigne, as always, frees us, frees us from being fragile and contradictory creatures that have naturally given rise to and need distraction.
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So if I get distracted, I’ll take care of it from now on. First I exist and then I think. And I think like Voltaire (another anti-Pascal in Aloisi’s essay), who couldn’t even remotely imagine sitting down to think seriously in a room; On the contrary, he was in favor of going out, making mistakes, living: “Man was created for action, as fire tends upwards and stone downwards”. Distraction builds bridges to reality staring at us. It’s something natural, a day isn’t possible without being distracted, just as it’s not possible to recover from puberty or spring after summer. Not getting confused is just as strange as finding someone who agrees on everything.
Reading Aloisi made me look back and realize that I’ve always been easily distracted. While studying, while enjoying reading and studying, some afternoons I would suddenly leave my desk and indulge in distraction by wandering aimlessly. Since I didn’t have to be home at a certain time and was committed to myself, the walk gave me answers to questions I hadn’t asked myself. What do I miss about youth? Time to drift. I just walked like that because mystery was a refuge for curiosity and the road was my field. Now, thanks to the distraction, I have two or three friends that I spontaneously call every day. Today, when there is no daily treatment, the cell phone is the meeting point, the bar where we used to meet. If you’ve never felt like a cheater, chances are, Horacio said. If we look at it in perspective, distraction has occupied Western thought since Augustine – “It is easier to move an arm than to direct the course of our thoughts” – to Heidegger, who never tires of repeating in Being and Time, that man is subject to what is said, spoken, murmured… until he succumbs to “courtship”.
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After two hours of pleasant concentration, in my third distraction that morning, I stopped correcting this article to listen once more to the Milonga del Solitaire from my admired Atahualpa Yupanqui, the Pampa Indian who only walks sitting and with the guitar: “Every now and then I like to lose myself in a drum game, because when I play the drums I realize that I can’t even control myself. The strings order the directions of thought, and in the slow trot of a country milonga, the best feeling comes out, out in the field.” Yupanqui didn’t have to walk to feel like a flaneur, the tune was enough for him as it was for me it was enough to just listen to him, return to a poem without justification, check the clarity of the sky, or call a friend. Incidentally, Atahualpa was once asked what a friend is, and he replied: A friend is one even with a different skin.
Reading Aloisi also brought me back to one of my fundamental readings: Manual del distraído, a book by Alejandro Rossi that was published the first day I started working at Lateral magazine (now I know it was prescient) , accidentally fell on my desk when he was convinced he needs to think hard, need to think seriously. “Thinking,” says Rossi, “will be dizzying, but it is also the main way of judging simple and grandiose facts. Distraction is the willful pursuit of issues that don’t matter. Distraction expresses the humanism of those who do not propose straight and systematic paths…” and I think of the edges, of lateral thoughts, like the leaps of the knight in chess, as Canetti would say.
So I’m glad to know doubt and reverie. In the distraction I find mental stimuli that compensate for the loss of time. The wandering of my intellect (dare I say intelligence, you understand me) seems unusual and commonplace to me. Octavio Paz wrote in the prologue to Rossi’s book: “The distracted are not indifferent, on the contrary, they are attracted to the 10,000 things that, according to the Chinese, make up this universe. The absent-minded go through the world. It’s not that he’s not interested in the novel he’s writing, it’s that he’s interested in everything.”
Returning to The Power of Distraction: I agree with Aloisi in his devotion to the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who went further by defending distraction and its importance even in the upbringing and development of children. Not only mental distraction is necessary for Deleuze, but also physical, the need to distract the body. For him, the big drama of today’s children is therefore the transition to primary school, when they suddenly and out of the blue play gambling after three years at the age of six, without still knowing the meaning of the calendar and they have to learn schedules, every day of the week being locked at a desk for hours. So they have no choice but to abstract themselves as much as possible from the bars of the blackboard, because distraction and imagination must be given free rein.
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