Thoreau's Axe

Many people today feel pulled in every direction, their focus broken up by the alerts and screens that fill their days. Caleb Smith argues that this problem has a longer history than it appears. In nineteenth-century America, writers and clergy were also worried about distraction, and this book studies their efforts to train the mind. Its sources range from a Protestant clergyman's caution against trivial thoughts to Henry David Thoreau's reflections on staying awake at Walden Pond.

Smith follows how Americans came to value attention, mindfulness, and forms of spirituality that exist apart from organized religion. He also shows how older Christian ideas about temptation and devotion still shape modern thinking about distraction. In his account, nineteenth-century anxieties grew out of concern that new technologies and economic systems were harming the mind. Once a wandering mind was identified as a problem, it was thought to require therapy or rehabilitation.

The book is modeled on nineteenth-century devotional manuals and is made up of twenty-eight short passages about attention, each read closely. Its figures include social reformers who designed moral training for ordinary people, religious leaders who organized Christian revivals, and seekers such as Thoreau, who tried simple living and transcendental mysticism. Through them, Smith presents the disciplines of attention as the spiritual exercises of a distracted age.