Author: Jenny Odell
themes
Summary
notes
- Josef Pieper’s Leisure the Basis of Culture
- leisure means “running at right angles”
- these moments of realizing that you’re deeply grateful to be alive
- “springs precisely from our inability to understand, from our recognition fo the mysterious nature of the universe”
- practice of taking photos of the sky using tripod
- this is very similar to the impulse for my i love living note
- an “otherness,” a “reminding thing,” “the essence of earth” “so un-anything”
- “Creative Evolution” by Henri Bergson
- élan vital: vital impetus or life force
- an “irreversible turn of the kaleidoscope, something driving division, reproduction, growth, decay, and complexity”
- “timefulness” sense of time where you perceive the “space” inherent in it
- ex: tree rings, pearls, sediment layers, beaches are full of time (pebbles are both future sand and ancient seafloors)
- “wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.”
- newtonian time vs. quantum and relativity. Western = Newtonian, we like to fit things in explicit boxes.
- even the 4 seasons are a Newtonian concept, rather than becoming intimate with the seasons that are inherent to a place
- infraordinary coined by Georges Perec in “Approaches to What?” to describe the “layer inside or just beneath the ordinary,” in contrast to our focus on the extraordinary. To see it, involves the challenge of “seeing through the habitual.”
- the desire to observe “what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.”
- “patch lists” to designate “unofficial spaces delineated only by attention” for birding app
- a completely localized sense of place
- a “clock” as something that tells time but rather time in the sense of history rather than a static, linear kind of time
- “This exercise of unfreezing something in time is not hard to do. If you want to see time that isn’t fungible, just pick a point in space-a branch, a yard, a sidewalk square, a webcam and simply keep watch. A story is being written there. Like the larger and larger wind patterns on Windy.com, this story is inseparable from the story of all life, even yours. This story is, finally, the signature of “it”: the restless, unstoppable, constantly overturning thing that makes it all go.”
- abstract things are easy to dehumanize because “they don’t have agency”
- but how do you reconcile this with needing systemic change (which often requires neat abstractions?) like what is argued in inventing the future
- “routine can demean but it can also protect; routine can decompose labour, but it can also compose a life” — on rituals
- chronodiversity
- gardening time by tending to different rhythms of life
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Resonance, by contrast [with recognition] is always a dynamic event, the expression of a vibrant responsive relationship that can be seen perhaps most splendidly when a person’s eyes light up… . [It] always refers to an occurrence between two or more subjects. I am recognized, but resonance is something that can only happen between us. Love as a resonant experience thus refers not to the fact of loving or being loved, but to the moment or moments of mutual, transformative, fluid, affecting encounter. —HARTMUT ROSA, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World
- Peter Handke on “essay on tiredness”
- “Handke compares “divisive tired-ness,” the isolating exhaustion of burnout, with a more resigned “tired-ness that trusts in the world” (or surrenders to a lake).”
- ""deep tiredness loosens the strictures of identity. Things flicker, twinkle, and vibrate at the edges.”
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I remember it as a kind of opening onto infinity. Through that opening, I saw something else someone else, beckoning from a different version of time and space, where suburban gardens, far-flung wintering grounds, summer, and winter were all intertwined. From somewhere outside me. Similarly, Handke describes a certain kind of tiredness as enabling “more of less of me,” the reality that expands when the ego recedes. Quoting Handke, Han writes, “The trusting tired ness ‘opens the I and makes room for the world. … One sees, and one is seen. One touches, and one is touched. … Less I means more world: “Now tiredness was my friend. I was back in the world again."""
- “more of less of me” — really a lot of ideas i was trying to get to in dilution
- “If aliveness means touching and being touched being in the world, being kept alive then the scale between living and dead is inescapably social.”
- being able to “touch” each other, and the world is what forms the base foundation for solidarity systems of solidarity
- i experienced “it” that Jenny Odell talks about, regarding a timelessness, an outward expansion rather than a linear forward movement
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As Price implies when he writes about “the hidden cost of spirit murder,” people who move through a dead world are themselves less alive than they could be. People and things are alive when we become alive to one another. To regard someone is a balancing of power, an agreement not just to shift one’s center of gravity, but to admit to two centers.
- Up UK documentary following people’s lives every 7 years
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Nevertheless, seeing the past clips pile up gives an undeniable depth to subsequent segments, with each one appearing like the lighter-colored new growth on a plant each spring.
- people more like plants than like static / all-or-nothing people
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- “death is not a terrifying leap into the abyss, but more like an embrace of ongoing life”
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Like Miller’s definition of aliveness as “touching] the planet,” Handke’s description of touching and being touched, or Hartmut Rosa’s “resonance” in the epigraph for this chapter, my definition of being alive is simply that: the embrace. I feel alive if I’m not alone in the air, but embraced by it. I feel alive when someone’s eyes light up, and mine do too. I feel alive if I can look at a deer and see it looking back at me; if, when geese speak, it sounds like language; if, when I walk on the ground, I feel it pushing back against me. I’m alive to the extent that I can be moved.
- the state of love where you lose yourself when you are sitting with the immensity of nature and you are completly outside of time
- it is hard to maintain, more like “rain” where it comes and goes
