![]() ![]() The final chapter looks at the spatial and temporal context needed to fully engage with others. This diminishing of the self as the center of everything applies not just to other humans but to all forms of life. ![]() Next, she explains why strangers are necessary to local areas and the importance of accepting them on equal terms as ourselves. In Chapter 4, she reviews ways people can work on increasing their attention to recognize what’s right in front of them and apply a strengthened attention to things in their local area. This is just what she discusses in the next chapter, with examples from Melville’s story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to Henry David Thoreau to the labor movement of the 1930s. Odell maintains that we ought to remain in society even if we reject parts of it and seek to make our own space. The trouble with this search for a kind of utopia is that it results in a lack of agency, with someone else too often making the rules for others. There have always been people who sought to do this, from ancient Greece to the commune movement of the 1960s. In Chapter 2, Odell examines the impulse to reject society entirely and isolate oneself. ![]()
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