Slow perception of strangers reveals dense accumulated life experience
Evidence
Once I accepted the fact that each face I looked at (and I tried to look at each of them) was associated with an entire life—of birth, of childhood, of dreams and disappointments, of a universe of anxieties, hopes, grudges, and regrets totally distinct from mine—this slow scene became almost impossibly absorbing. As Hockney said: “There’s a lot to look at.” Even though I’ve lived in a city most of my adult life, in that moment I was floored by the density of life experience folded into a single city street. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 450
Categorization
- XREF: Directly illustrates the chapter’s slow-attention method via Hockney’s scroll-painting gaze — supports the reader’s assessment of Odell’s mixed method as a reskilling of sight. — connects to: Brief attentive retreats change how one perceives ordinary life afterward — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 66; Paying attention to persistent local nonhuman life offers refuge from online hysteria. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 98; Humans unknowingly make their own brain through experience — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 48 (+1 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Brief attentive retreats change how one perceives ordinary life afterward — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 66; Paying attention to persistent local nonhuman life offers refuge from online hysteria. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 98; Humans unknowingly make their own brain through experience — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 48 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Stranger objectivity is freedom from perceptual and normative bias
#complicates(0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 395