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Updated: May 11, 2025
David Garrick's were evidently unpreoccupied, like theirs. The look of intelligence is outward frankly directed upon external things; it is observant, and therefore mobile without inner restlessness. For restless eyes are the least observant of all they move by a kind of distraction. The looks of observant eyes, moving with the living things they keep in sight, have many pauses as well as flights.
Such things are the best this good author gives us, whether they go gay with metaphor, or be bare thoughts shapely with their own truth. Part of the charm of Dr. Holmes's comment on life, and of the phrase wherein he secures it, arises from his singular vigilance. He has unpreoccupied and alert eyes.
It is not a parable, but a picture, which is a very different thing. What does M. Montégut make, one would ask, from the point of view of Hawthorne's pessimism, of the singularly objective and unpreoccupied tone of the Introduction to the Old Manse, in which the author speaks from himself, and in which the cry of metaphysical despair is not even faintly sounded?
What mornings and afternoons one might spend there, brush in hand, unpreoccupied, untormented, pensioned, satisfied either persuading one's self that one would be "doing something" in consequence or not caring if one shouldn't be.
It flashes on every reader whose imagination supplies an unpreoccupied, unrefracting, 'medium' to the Apostolic assertion, that corruption in this passage is a descriptive synonyme of the material sensuous organism common to saint and sinner, standing in precisely the same relation to the man that the testaceous offensive and defensive armour does to the crab and tortoise.
He looked on His mother; and it was with an unpreoccupied eye, that was able to disengage its attention from every other object by which it was solicited. He was suffering at the time an extremity of pain which might have made Him insensible to everything beyond Himself. Or, if He had composure enough to think, a dying man has many things to reflect upon within his own mind.
I'll bet that if he had used the phrases: "Gaze, as it were, unpreoccupied, outward or rather laterally in the direction of the horizon, underlaid, so to speak, with the adjacent fluid inlet," and "Now, returning or rather, in a manner, withdrawing your attention, bestow it upon my upraised digit" I'll bet, I say, that Henry James himself could have passed the examination.
Falkner, too, would have preferred the company of his own thoughts, but Lee, apparently the only unpreoccupied, all-pervading, and boyishly alert spirit in the party, hailed him from within, and obliged him to present himself on the threshold of the parlor with the hare and hawk's wing he was still carrying.
He could concentrate all his attention for any length of time upon one subject, and then, laying that aside entirely, without expending any energies in unavailing anxiety, could turn to another, with all the freshness and the vigor of an unpreoccupied mind. Incessant mental labor was the luxury of his life. "Occupation," said he, "is my element. I am born and made for it.
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