Mary Oliver s Poetry and the Meaning of Life

Foer, Franklin. “‘Attention is the Beginning of Devotion.’” The Atlantic, May, 2019.

The most important line in Foer’s article is this quote from the poet Mary Oliver: “Doesn’t anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the / middle of the night and / sing?” This quote gets to the essence of her poetry and to the inner heart of Foer’s piece: life is about more than daytripping one’s way through existence: it is about paying attention, as Oliver pointed out—but more than that: it is about realizing the beauty and majesty of being alive, and rousing oneself from one’s slumber to celebrate and sing out one’s thanksgiving—the way monks and religious used to do with their midnight orations.

The title of the piece is “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” which is a line from a Mary Oliver poem—and it, too, gets to the heart of what Foer is saying: in a world that is desperately trying to get everyone’s attention: a world of surveillance capitalism that is as interested in paying attention to us as we are to not paying attention to anything in particular. Yet Oliver extols the reader to pay strict and close attention to life itself—for life itself is limited by time and will surrender itself to death in the end. This is significant. This is something to consider. This is important. That is what Oliver says. That is what Foer seems to understand at the end: he has been sleeping; he has been remiss. Oliver is now dead: he should try to remember and incorporate her words into his life—while there is still time.