Twilt (n): the particular brand of guilt or self-reproach that results from posting, liking or commenting on items on Facebook or Twitter while simultaneously not responding to emails, text messages, phone calls or other types of personal communication with the knowledge or anxiety that the specific message senders will notice your public offerings and question your lack of private ones. Twilt, while related, is not the same as the guilt that results from general Internet-specific procrastination such as browsing blogs or online shopping, which, though it may result in its own brand of self-disgust, generally has no public shame component.

Adam Zagajewski, in his essay “The Shabby and Sublime,” says that the poetry of recent years is “marked by a disproportion … between powerful expressions of the inner life and the ceaseless chatter of self-satisfied craftsmen.” The same could be said for Facebook updates, our contemporary confessional. I have eaten the plums in the refrigerator, and they were yummy. Facebook is bad for me because I not only embarrass myself but I keenly feel the embarrassment of others whose lack of discretion, as I perceive it, I quietly judge and am embarrassed by all the same.

When someone starts a conversation with me on Facebook, in public, I’m mortified. There’s a message function for that! I have email and a cellphone. Let me respond when I can, away from the watch of hundreds. Sometimes I disable my Wall so people can’t write things there, until someone points it out and I feel guilty that I’ve done this so I change it back. I don’t like to talk on the phone in public and when a friend speaks too loudly in a cafe I am nervous that someone will overhear our conversation. At home I don’t like the sensation of my husband overhearing me order pizza, let alone having more sensitive conversations with friends. I have never been one to kiss and tell, and I like to keep my private life private. Why I have a Facebook account at all still perplexes me. I like the idea of seeing what’s going on, but I don’t want to always be a part of it. I don’t want to not be a part of it either. I want to swoop in and swoop out. But Facebook doesn’t allow for inconsistency without amplifying it, a constant record of our obsessions and our contradictions to the point of caricature.

The conversations between couples embarrass me the most, whether they’re sentimental or self-referential. It’s not that you live with that person and somehow don’t need electronic communication — I often text my husband across the table at a bar to make a snarky comment, or sometimes I send ridiculous things to the online printer in his office just to be impish. But it’s done in private, between us. That’s the point. It’s something about the relationship having a public facade so contrived and self-aware that makes my eyes water with shame. We all have facades and personas, of course, that are not Internet confined. Game faces. Once, at a reading, a poet thanked his wife so gushingly that I whispered to my friend, “That guy is totally having an affair.” I didn’t know a thing about him. But it turns out, I was right. Maybe the wife requested the shout-out, but if I were his wife I would have smiled at the crowd and taken flight. Up, up and away.

Do you remember “This American Life’s” 2001 episode about Superpowers, which poses the question: If you could have a superpower, would you choose Flight or Invisibility? My first reaction was and remains, flight. To fly! I’m petite and have spent a lifetime trying to fight invisibility, being intellectually overlooked, or feeling insignificant (this is not simply a result of my size but an entire slew of issues that would benefit from Lacanian psychoanalysis, which if I had I’d have to talk about in my status updates). I still have dreams where I’m flying, frequent dreams, and when I wake up I feel inexplicably happy. When I fly in my dreams, I don’t sputter or start or anxiously hover. I soar, I glide, and it’s fluid, like a manta ray moving through water. When I fly in my dreams I am all grace. My desire for flight would get me places faster, and in style.

But maybe my desire for flight is a sort of conditional invisibility; the idea of flight not only as the act of flying but the act of fleeing. I want to be part of the scene but to float somehow above it, to engage in the action but then be able to gracefully exit. I want to swoop on in and then glide away. But I want to be seen, for sure, and present. I just don’t want to have to stay, and I certainly don’t want anyone to comment on it.

It is also, of course, part of being a writer, to be part of a scene but also removed. Writing is about observation, but if I observe and immediately state then I’ve lost it, released it. The essay allows an expression of doubt but the Facebook update or conversation has a sort of self-satisfied glibness to it. It doesn’t invite dialogue but somehow challenges it. There is also the lack of control. It could go anywhere. Someone could say something too revealing or racist or just plain idiotic, and there it is, linked to your name. It is not a place for the anxious, Facebook.

And there is the difference of stance. An essay is an attempt at dialogue but a status update is a solicitation; the first is a meaningful hesitation or an assertive pronouncement, a languorous dip in a warm sea or a fast-paced race in a pool. But the essay swims all the same. A Facebook update is a haphazard nose dive into a near-empty watering hole. What if I break my neck? Will someone find me if my head is bleeding? If I post and no one comments, do I exist?

The comparison between the two forms needn’t be made; we know the difference, yet it might explain my relative comfort, even ease, with the personal essay and my fear of any public sort of dialogue. Do I want to be invisible or do I want to fly? Although the personal is intimate there is also the artifice of distance. When I fly in my dreams I can see myself flying while being aware of my place on the ground. Philip Lopate argues that a good essayist must see oneself from the ceiling, must turn oneself into a character. He is not advocating a “self-absorbed navel-gazing” but instead “a release from narcissism,” an ability to be able to “see yourself in the round.”

I admit I am often self-amused by my status updates (what else are they for?), but I am rarely satisfied with them. In the rare case I am amused with myself when writing anything, that to me is a sure sign that it’s going to need a very careful edit, or that it’s garbage.

What I love best about that episode of “This American Life” is the moving analysis at the end, immediately after several of the show’s guests comment on what it means to want invisibility or flight. John Hodgman reflects:

Flight and invisibility touch a nerve. Actually, they touch two different nerves, speak to very different primal desires and unconscious fears … In the end, it’s not a question of what kind of person flies and what kind of person fades. We all do both. … At the heart of this decision, the question I really don’t want to face, is this. Who do you want to be, the person you hope to be, or the person you fear you actually are?

Am I becoming someone on Facebook or am I trying to escape her? I’m happy my partner is not on Facebook because I am spared that public embarrassment, of people wishing us happy anniversary or the pressure to comment, or not comment, on his witticisms or offerings: J. just made fabulous butternut squash ravioli! From scratch! Natalie likes this. And then he would like my liking, and another friend would find it cute, and like it too, and no one would know that we spent the last hour fighting because I overloaded the dryer and almost burned down the house.

I wouldn’t mind if he joined Facebook, though, because he is the face man of our relationship and it would take some of the completely imagined but hugely felt pressure off me. (“Could you please like so-and-so’s photos of her daughter’s dance recital?”) If we had a band, he’d be the lead singer and I’d be the bassist, hiding behind my hair. (No, not the drummer! No one sees the drummer!) The bassist can look up and make eye contact with the crowd for a moment and the crowd will go wild. They don’t expect it but they hope for it all the same. The face man: He has to be on all the time. It’s his job to be on.

Do you remember the scene in “Sex in the City” where Carrie, upon receiving an email, ducks underneath her desk and shrieks, Oh my god, can he see me? A decade later it seems charming, like a text message from our grandmother. Yet the anxiety remains. Now, I suffer from what is surely a new psychological disorder: a DSM-IV classifiable paranoia that all my personal conversations are somehow being broadcast on Twitter. Is there a word for that?

But the sign is also turned away from East Palo Alto, a neighboring low-income community of color adjacent to Menlo Park. That city will be the gateway to Facebook for many commuters and may be the future home of some of the 9,000-plus employees who are expected to work at the new location. And while the rest of the Valley celebrates the expansion of the new company that is redefining how the world communicates and uses technology, East Palo Alto residents say they see more of the same: another powerful Silicon Valley corporation that will benefit at the expense, and perhaps displacement, of their city.

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“No doubt they are doing the same ‘giving back’ as other Silicon Valley companies, and they get points for that. But maybe some of that is good P.R.,” says Carlos Romero, East Palo Alto City Council member, and current San Mateo County supervisor candidate.

“They have their bottom line to protect, and if they can move into an area and not pay to mitigate costs they create, they are going to do that,” he said.

The East Palo Alto costs Romero is referring to are the transportation and housing impacts that will occur with the influx of thousands of new Facebook employees to their region.

As obligated by the California Environmental Quality Act, Facebook conducted a draft Environmental Impact Report of its expansion for Menlo Park, the city of its residence. Despite the proximity and overlap of entering roads, the report did not address the environmental or potential housing displacement issues with East Palo Alto.

The East Palo Alto Community Development Department registered its dismay in a letter: “We are disappointed that the draft EIR does not adequately consider the potential impacts to the City of East Palo Alto, or consider potential mitigation measures to address those impacts.”

Through the EIR process, at the end of January, the City of East Palo submitted a collection of comments, from city officials, residents and civic organizations, expressing their concerns.

Facebook has three months to respond to each listed claim.

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Yet even outside of the formal EIR process, a disagreement over the impact has developed along lines of housing displacement in East Palo Alto. In response to a letter from the City of East Palo Alto regarding the concern that thousands of new Facebook employees with higher incomes could drive out current local residents with less economic power, the company’s consulting firm, Keyser Marston Associates, is equivocal.

They write, “Impacts will be minimal if a very limited number of workers seek housing in East Palo Alto; conversely, if East Palo Alto is viewed as an attractive option by a large share of Facebook’s workforce, impacts would be greater.”

The response brief then goes on to say that Facebook employees are “unique” in that they are “younger, more affluent, more mobile, and newer to the Bay Area.” Consequently, the hipper Facebook employee would “be more interested in living in San Francisco to be joined in the ‘youth scene’ in the city.”

Romero contends the rationale defies logic, saying that even a fraction of Facebook employees living in East Palo Alto will impact its housing costs.

“Just a low estimate, say, 450 people, entering the housing market, that is going to have an impact,” he says.

East Palo Alto’s relatively small population attributes to the sensitive market. On last census count, East Palo Alto was roughly 30,000 residents, so the number of Facebook employees, estimated at 9,600 at full capacity, would represent a third of the city.

But even having a majority of Facebook residents living outside of the area can also be a problem, with an increased number of people using East Palo Alto as a thoroughfare to the new campus.

Anna Turner, a 27-year-old program director for Youth United for Community Action, an environmental justice organization, is a lifelong resident of East Palo Alto. She says the city’s neighborhoods are already overrun with Silicon Valley workers trying to avoid the larger streets such as University Avenue that connect Silicon Valley with the Dumbarton Bridge heading toward the East Bay. “University, which connects 101 to 84, has over 30,000 drivers during peak hours. It gets so packed drivers will take side streets, ignoring traffic signs, making life hard for residents.”

Her organization, along with others, has partnered with the city to form a sort of united front to ensure Facebook hears their concerns.

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Though young, Turner is a veteran of East Palo Alto’s organizing history, well versed in EIRs, land-use issues and, more recently, housing and tenants rights. She says the Facebook move-in is yet another piece of a development pattern that is built for Silicon Valley, but with no considerations to the well-being of East Palo Alto.

She points to buildings such as Ikea, the high-end furniture store that prompted new traffic management strategies to accommodate shoppers; the posh Four Seasons Hotel, which required the paving over of the nerve center of East Palo Alto, known as Whiskey Gulch; and Romic, a toxic waste recycling business that was finally removed from the city after residents contended the company polluted the air for decades.

Most recently, Turner and her organization have been battling the monopolization of sales of apartments, as housing concerns skyrocketed with the foreclosure crisis. Her concern is that newer real estate companies such as Equity Residential, which just took over a major apartment complex of 1,800 units – making it the largest landlord in East Palo Alto — may mow down the rent-controlled apartments to make way for a more affluent Facebook crowd.

Romero finds Turner’s perception that the East Palo Alto she grew up in is being developed away a common one – one only emboldened by the Facebook expansion. “The fear by many community members is that local residents will be left out of the economic environment that is improving, meaning displacement,” he says.

Of the concerns from East Palo Alto officials and residents, Facebook spokesman Tucker Bounds says, “We are hopeful that East Palo Alto sees the enormous benefits of our move. We are having an open dialogue to see how we can work together.”

When asked if the Facebook move has impacted her usage of the social media site, Turner, a youthful, connected, tech-savvy woman in her own right, says yes. “I ‘deactivated’ my personal page and don’t even check my business page.

“I mean, so many people use that site worldwide, and it’s amazing that here is the place where Facebook actually lives.”

Romero says he doesn’t use Facebook, though many people “he respects a lot” want him to utilize the device for his supervisorial campaign.

It seems fair enough to create a boundary on a social media site. And it doesn’t take much searching – likely in your own friend feed – to see plenty of mothers who have profile photos or family albums that depict them proudly nursing their children.

The problem, however, is Facebook’s capriciousness enforcement terms, and how maddeningly punitive and arbitrary they can be. Some women skate by with nary an eyelash batted at their pictures. But a person whose photo is deemed by Facebook to have an unacceptable degree of nipple will not just find the picture removed, but often her account temporarily deleted on a vague “breach of terms of use” charge. Treating women like petty criminals for posting what are obviously not sexually explicit images is just stupid business.

So on Monday, mothers took to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., and offices all over the world to do their lactating in person. As childbirth educator Emma Kwasnica, who attended a nurse-in in Houston this week, told the local CBS affiliate, “There’s no other way to look at it. We’re being treated as pornographers.”

Judge for yourself — though be prepared that the occasional nipple may qualify the images as NSFW — the “Topfree Equal Rights Association” has a neat compilation of photos that Facebook users say have been removed over the years. Some of them dare to show a contentiously exposed, not-in-use breast along with a baby contentedly latched on the other one.

None of them seem especially incendiary — and none of them look that different from other photos that  survived just fine on Facebook. The idea that the biggest difference between the photos that stay and those that are deleted is “users who complain” is insulting. It tells women to be prepared to be punished, largely on the basis of whether someone else decides they ought to be. And in the same week that a jackass like Staples co-founder Tom Stemberg whined that the Affordable Care Act, which grants a “reasonable break time” and space for working mothers to express milk, will turn America’s workplaces into sinisterly futuristic-sounding “lactation chambers,” Facebook’s ongoing boneheadedness speaks to a larger issue. It illuminates the depressing reality that breast-feeding, after all this time, is still deemed inappropriate, unproductive and just plain icky. And that a nipple, even one with a hungry baby nearby, is just darn scandalous.

Why does it matter? And why would a woman choose to post a photo of her baby at her breast, anyway? Well, for starters, if you’ve got a baby, chances are high that you’re in a near-constant state of having somebody clamped on you. If somebody wants to take a picture, odds are good that’s what it’s going to be. It’s often sweet, tender and special, and photos encourage other people to accept it and maybe even give it a go themselves. A photo, after all, is a defining statement. And it’s one any mother, especially a new one, should be free to make.

Zuckerberg outlined how Facebook could be used as a platform to decrease spending and increase public participation in the political process: “I mean  all these people have great ideas and a lot of energy that they want to bring, and I think for a lot of people it’s just about having an easy and a cheap way for them too to communicate  their ideas.”

“Brilliant,” Cameron said.

Within a year, Zuckerberg had a seat at the table with government leaders. In May 2011, he attended the G-8 Summit, the annual meeting of key heads of state (named after the  eight advanced economies—France,  the  United  States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada,  and Russia). The media reported that world leaders from German  Chancellor Angela Merkel to French President Nicolas Sarkozy were more in awe of Zuckerberg than he was of them.

Zuckerberg summarized  how Facebook had played a role in worldwide democratic movements and pressed his own policy agenda — urging European officials to back off of proposed regulation of the Internet. “People tell me, ‘On the one hand, it’s great you played such a big role in the Arab Spring, but it’s also kind of scary because you enable all this sharing and collect information on people,’” Zuckerberg said.

Is it odd to think of Mark Zuckerberg as a head of state? Perhaps. But Facebook has the power and reach of a nation. With more than 750 million members, Facebook’s population would make it the third-largest nation in the world. It has citizens, an economy, its own currency, systems for resolving disputes, and relations with other nations and institutions. After watching the video chat between Cameron and Zuckerberg, I became intrigued by the concept of a social network as a nation. I began to wonder: What kind of government rules Facebook? What are its politics? And, if it is like a nation, should it have a constitution?

In many instances, the principles would help courts make a determination  in a case, analyze existing laws, and decide whether or not to let evidence in at trial. These values could also guide legislators who are considering adopting new laws to regulate social networks.

The very nature of social networks is constantly changing. New technologies are introduced and individual users face new issues. A set of strict, rigid rules governing the use of social networks might be effective now but will quickly become outdated, just as other laws that are intended to protect people, such as wiretapping laws and consent laws, fail to protect and serve the needs of the current online community. Unlike the rigid, formula-driven Internal Revenue Code, a Social Network Constitution should be flexible and recognize basic principles that we should never outgrow. Its provisions would address the actions of government agencies, social institutions and society at large.

Every democratic nation has governing principles about what rights its citizens have over property, privacy, life and liberty. The citizens of Facebook Nation deserve no less.

Excerpted from “I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy,” by Lori Andrews. Copyright 2012 by Lori Andrews. Published by Free Press.

In her new book, “The Republic of Noise,” New York City public school educator and curriculum advisor Diana Senechal argues that one reason for this problem is the students’ loss of solitude: the ability to think and reflect independently on a given topic. Schools have become more concerned with the business of keeping students busy in what Senechal deems is a flawed attempt to ensure student engagement. But as a result, students are not given the time and space to devote themselves completely to the study and understanding of one specific thing. It’s a need she finds reflected in our culture as a whole: We are a nation glued to smartphones and computer screens, checking email and Twitter feeds in our need to stay in some loop by reading and responding to rolling updates. Senechal is not advocating that we toss out our iPhones or unplug from social media, but rather that we think more slowly, give ourselves time for reflection — as such practice would only serve to enhance the very conversations new media and technology make possible.

Salon spoke to Senechal over the phone about the problems with our educational system, the meaning of solitude, and the dangers of immediacy.

What’s your definition of solitude?

The idea of solitude as an attribute of the mind goes back to antiquity. The Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus distinguished between a negative sort of isolation (helplessness, removal from others) and the strength that comes from relying on one’s own mental resources. Quintilian wrote about the importance of overcoming distractions through mental concentration and separation. “In the midst of crowds, therefore, on a journey, and even at festive meetings,” he wrote, “let thought secure for herself privacy.”

Solitude is not about being in a hut out in the woods or being out in the desert or living without other people around. I define solitude as a certain apartness that we always have, whether we’re among others or not. It is something that can be practiced — maybe to think just on one’s own, even when in a meeting or in a group and so forth — but that also has been nurtured by time alone. So there’s an ongoing solitude that’s always there, and there’s also a shaped or practiced solitude, which requires both time alone with things, to be thinking about things and working on things, and time among others when you nonetheless think independently.

You’re critical of certain educational philosophies in practice in schools today, especially the workshop model. Why?

The workshop model has an emphasis on group work and a de-emphasis on teacher presentation. What happens is the teacher is supposed to give a mini-lesson which is about 10 minutes long. From there students are supposed to work in groups on something related to that mini-lesson, sometimes independently, but most of the time in groups. At the end they are supposed to share about what they learned. This was mandated across the board, across the grades and subjects, in many schools. Every lesson is supposed to follow a workshop model. (Of course some schools were a little bit more flexible about this than others.)

The problem with that is that the workshop model is very wonderful for certain lessons and topics, but when you apply it across the board, you are constraining the subject matter. You need a variety of approaches in order to deal with a topic. You may need a lesson where the teacher gives an extended presentation to give the students necessary background. Or an extended discussion. For instance, the students may have a project that they will have to do together, but they have to work on their own to build up to that point.

Also, schools have put an enormous emphasis on skills – or what are called skills – at the expense of content. This has been going on for decades. No one wants to specify what students should read, but they say that they should be analyzing and comparing and contrasting. Well, none of this has meaning unless you know what it is you’re comparing and contrasting or analyzing. What happens is, students write essays that show that they haven’t read very closely, and yet this passes because it meets the checks on the checklist: that it has the right number of paragraphs; it has an introduction, body, conclusion; it seems as though they’re comparing something with something. There is a contagious vagueness because we don’t specify what we’re talking about and what students should learn. We then encourage in them a certain vagueness and carelessness. The problem perpetuates itself, and it turns up much later when students enter college and don’t know how to write a coherent essay. Well, the reason this comes up is that they’re in courses where they’re expected to read on specific topics, and that’s where things fall apart and it’s no longer about the rubric.

So the problem lies in the idea of putting the model above the actual subject. You have to think about the subject and think about how you’re going to bring this to the students, and think about the type of lesson that will do that best. Often you’ll find that you need a combination of types of lessons.

Are you advocating for more teacher autonomy?

Yes,  but not for just everyone to do whatever they want. I’m advocating for careful thought about the subject itself.

You write that we “mistake distraction for engagement”? How so? How does it affect even mental cognition?

I’m not a psychologist, but in the classroom and in many discussions on education, what I see is an emphasis on keeping the students busy from start to finish. Not letting a moment creep in where they don’t have something specific to do, something concrete where they are actually producing something. So if you keep them busy, busy, busy, and doing something at every moment, then supposedly they’re engaged. And when supervisors walk into classrooms and look and see the students writing and turning and talking, their conclusion is “Oh! What an engaged class!” The problem with that is then students don’t learn how to handle moments of doubt, or moments of silence, or moments where they have to struggle with a problem and they can’t produce something right on the spot. So, the students themselves come to expect to be put to work at every moment. If you want to give them something more difficult, you have to expect a little uncertainty. You have to expect a little bit of silence, a little bit of an awkward pause where they don’t know exactly what to do right away. What happens in this focus on visible engagement, we lose something that may go deeper, where students may have a chance to wrestle with something that’s a little bit above his or her head and where the answer is not immediately apparent.

This spreads outside the classroom too.

What I see is people having great difficulty sitting with a book for a long time, or with a pad of paper. They want to have the stimulus right nearby – they want access to their email, they want access to their text messages no matter what they’re doing. You see people walking down the street with their phones and just staring at their phones; and you see people holding their phones in all situations – at a concert or when having dinner with a friend – so they can check that they don’t miss anything. Yes, there is a loss of ability to just sit with something.

In trying to instill a greater habit of solitude in educational curricula, how do you see this working in an overcrowded classroom with limited resources? 

That’s also a problem with the workshop lesson. Students won’t necessarily be engaged or be following along. Perhaps the biggest problem you’ll see is some students doing the work and others just following along. You’ll see some students using it as a time to socialize and others taking it seriously. So that problem is going to be there across the board. What students do respond to – and the workshop can be a part of it – is a lesson that makes sense, where they understand that you’re going from point A to point B. They understand that now that they have a grasp on this material, you’re going to take them here with it.

How do we then measure how well a student is learning and progressing, and do so as early as possible?

That’s where content-specific tests come in. Where we’ve gone astray is with tests that test quite general skills – you know, reading comprehension tests. There isn’t a good way to prepare for those tests, so we have a rather amorphous program of literacy where students learn all kinds of reading strategies but the emphasis is not on reading concrete things. You can test students on their reading of the subject matter, and not just factual knowledge, but their understanding. But then you have to have an actual course with actual subject matter taught, and you have to have a test that is about that course.

Math is a different case, and that’s why we see more progress with math than with English-language arts, because there is more of a math curriculum. But even with math, many districts have curricula that just jump from topic to topic so that students don’t go deep into any topic. [Students] learn how to do all sorts of different things, but they don’t know how to do them especially well. Tests have a role, but the curriculum has to come first.

Do you think we are overemphasizing the need to have a standardized method of teaching or testing?

Yes and no. There has to be a certain need for standardized tests to compare from state to state, and district to district, and get a measure of what’s going on across the board.  And because it’s politically close to impossible to agree on a common curriculum, it probably would not be a good idea to have a very specific national curriculum. Those tests are going to be on the general side, but because of that, they should not be the be-all and end-all. Because they are so general, they should not match what the curriculum actually is. The curriculum should be much richer, and the tests that go along with that curriculum should be given more importance.

What has been found in many cases is when a school actually does not hold those tests so high, doesn’t put them on a pedestal but instead teaches a curriculum that is very considered, substantial and valuable, the students end up doing very well on the [standardized] tests. One must, in a sense, go beyond the test to do well on them.

You write about what you see as our obsession with the idea of success and our desire to do away with failure. What do we lose in the process of striving for success?

There is nothing wrong with striving for success at something meaningful. But if the emphasis is on the success and not on the thing being accomplished, the latter almost inevitably gets reduced. You can be successful if you make the task easy enough or lower the standards enough. You can feel good about it temporarily and get temporary approval or applause. But it is much more valuable, in the end, to accomplish something concrete, even if it doesn’t manifest itself as success for a long time.

For instance, a student is having difficulty with fractions. Well, that student should work on fractions until that student feels comfortable and fluent with them. But the talk emphasizes that “the student succeeds.” We hear about successful schools, successful students, successful people and so forth. Usually this means having some attainment of high stature, high score or high salary. The true accomplishments come often in the absence of these immediate, visible results; and if you sit and work with a subject, or you sit and struggle with a language, you may go for months without feeling you’re succeeding necessarily, but what you’re getting is something that won’t go away. Over time, after that constant practice and struggle, you find that you have attained something: You come to know that language. So the attention must go to the thing itself that you’re trying to do.