A Plain Grammar of Attention

The word yet is among the smallest words in English and one of the most rigorous. It joins a thing to its opposite without claiming to resolve them. It says: this is true, and also, the other is true. It does not give up its ground.

I think often of how Simone Weil uses the word in her notebooks. She will write a sentence of austere theological violence and then, without warning, a yet, and the sentence after the yet will be small and tender and almost domestic. The two halves do not cancel. They hold each other up.