Communes seeking escape held an ahistorical, land-backwards view of time.

Evidence

Those who fled to the communes took a particularly ahistorical view of time; according to Houriet, the communes were relatively unaware of the history of utopian experiments—maybe even Epicurus’s garden school. But this is perhaps to be expected from anyone desperately seeking a complete break from everything. Houriet writes that those who fled “had no time to assess the historical parallels or to make careful plans for the future…Their flight was desperate.” After all, this wasn’t the 1960s; it was the Age of Aquarius, an exit from time and a chance to start from scratch: … Somewhere in the line of history, civilization had made a wrong turn, a detour that had led into a cul-de-sac. The only way, they felt, was to drop out and go all the way back to the beginning, to the primal source of consciousness, the true basis of culture: the land. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 157

Categorization

• DEFINE: Contrasts the communes’ exit-from-time frame with Odell’s later case that true attention (and refusal) must not retreat from history — the commune movement is the literal version of the withdrawal her title is often misread to endorse.