"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." – Simone Weil, letter to Joë Bousquet (1942)
FIELD NOTES – Dr. Eleanor Hartley LOCATION: The House of Endowed Hours, Quarter of Rectitude SUBJECT: Economy The Bureau's survey template asks for currency, principal exports and the means of exchange. I have put a line through all three and written: reading. The Cité has one scarce resource, and it is attention. There are more stones than readers. Every resident reads – on the Hours, in the evenings at the Ward, at the Gate when a new stone is laid – and so does every guest, and so, without knowing it, does every reader in every other Shard who opens a book with a woman in it. It is not enough. It has never been enough. When Fatima al-Fihri arrived, she told me, the city was reading at random. The famous stones were read every day and the oldest ones were blanching in the dark. She set up the Rota in her first month. The House of Endowed Hours is a courtyard house in the manner of Fez: green-tiled roofs, horseshoe arches, a fountain in the middle, and on the wall a great brass wat...
From the lore of Cité des Dames.