Withdrawal only matters if its lessons are carried back to society

Evidence

It’s only for this reason that in 2018, someone (me) is reading them in another garden. It’s in this exchange that such experiments become valuable for the world, as points in a dialogue between inside and outside, real and unrealized. As Ursula K. LeGuin writes in The Dispossessed, a novel in which a man returns to Earth for the first time from an anarchist colony: “The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 213

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates what makes retreat meaningful: return and testimony, not mere absence.
• XREF: Directly supports defending Odell against the withdrawal misreading; connects to the reader’s stated reading purpose and to a concept like ‘capaciousness vs. evasion.’ — connects to: Escaping society through withdrawal itself creates higher status — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 297