The Triumph of the Slippers: On the Withdrawal from the World

by Pascal Bruckner, Cory Stockwell (Translator)

Since the beginning of the 21st century, global warming, terrorism, the pandemic and now the war in Ukraine have created a widespread feeling that the world is an increasingly dangerous place.  In response to this situation, it is understandable that many people are inclined to retreat to the safety of their home – the last refuge and safeguard against the savagery of the outside world.  But the home is not just a it is a space that supplants and replaces the world, a wired cocoon that gradually renders any journey to the outside world superfluous.

From our couch, we can enjoy remotely the pleasures once offered by the cinema, the theatre and the café. Everything, from food to love to art, can be delivered to your door. Armed with a smartphone and a Netflix account, why would anyone risk life and limb to venture out to the cinema?  Compulsory confinement, the nightmare of the pandemic years, seems to have been replaced by voluntary self-confinement. Fleeing from the cities, working remotely, relinquishing travel and tourism, we risk becoming reclusive creatures that cower at the slightest tremor.

In this witty and spirited book, Pascal Bruckner takes aim at today’s voluntary seclusionism and the self-inflicted atrophy that comes with it, tracing its philosophical contours and historical roots. It is no longer the tyranny of lockdowns that threatens us but rather the tyranny of the will the slipper and the dressing gown be the new symbols of tomorrow's world?

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Audiobook

118 pages, Hardcover

Published June 25, 2024

About the author

Pascal Bruckner est un romancier et essayiste français, d'origine suisse protestante, né à Paris le 15 décembre 1948. Après des études au Lycée Henri IV à Paris, à l'université de Paris I et de Paris VII, et à l'Ecole pratique des hautes études, Pascal Bruckner devient professeur invité à l'Université d'Etat de San Diego en Californie et à la New York University de 1986 à 1995. Maître de conférences à l'Institut d'études politiques de Paris de 1990 à 1994, il collabore également au Monde et au Nouvel Observateur. Romancier prolifique, on lui doit Lunes de fiel - adapté à l'écran par Roman Polanski - Les Voleurs de beauté - prix Renaudot en 1997 - et plus récemment L'Amour du prochain (2005).

Pascal Bruckner is a French writer, one of the "New Philosophers" who came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. Much of his work has been devoted to critiques of French society and culture. He is the author of many books including The Tyranny of Guilt, Perpetual Euphoria and The Paradox of Love. He writes regularly for Le Nouvel Observateur.

Reviews

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a pleasant surprise, very Nietzschean-Foucault-like; a genealogy/archeology of thought of a particular subject or phenomenon such as On the Genealogy of Morals, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Discipline and Punishment. The Birth of the Prison; Bruckner does a great job in dissecting 'the withdrawal from the world' and throws in some original insights for you to ponder over.

"Leave me alone when everything is fine, take care of me when it’s not. The modern patient is an impatient patient who is irritated by the limits of medicine (“incurable” is the only truly obscene word in our vocabulary), but also suspects it of having ill intentions or of being backed by shady financial interests. The more the progress of science accelerates, the more exasperation grows in the face of its flaws and delays: we cure so many diseases, so why can’t we cure them all?"

"The interior: this is the negative romance of our time, the prestige of the maternal dwelling, the house as cradle, the home as a womb. Covid was merely a midwife to the actual virus: a pre-existing allergy to the Outside."

"Nations, individuals, and families have all been won over by a fragmentation complex, which consists of reducing the space we occupy to an extreme, and results in each of us being wedged into our own niche. The transfixed crowds who march for the climate, in a way reminiscent of flagellants in the Middle Ages, do so as victims seeking to make amends rather than as political actors. They wail, scream, and cry, depriving themselves of their own agency as they protest. For a generation raised with the prospect of coming disaster, fed on the milk of terror, and persuaded of being History’s unloved ones, it’s not difficult to imagine that any exit from the cocoon might come to seem like a considerable expenditure of energy."

"Aristotle distinguished the vita activa from the vita contemplativa. We would need to invent a third category for our own time: the vita virtualis, the transformation of the apartment or the house into a microcosm that absorbs the macrocosm and renders it superfluous – a hiding place that holds all the treasures within itself. In the warmth of the cave, protected from the elements, we regard what comes from afar not as the light of Ideas but as the darkness of contingency."

"And so we’re encouraged to withdraw into ourselves, for the Outside is an abyss. Inertia is mistaken for prudence. Humanity must be placed under a glass dome. No one can endure the tragedies of our time for long without an escape valve, an excuse to go and hide. One of the most important achievements of freedom, the right to a private life, has thus been inverted: it is now equated with a renunciation of the exercise of public life."

"Only when doors and shutters are ajar does the tension between inside and outside become fertile, for this allows movement from one side to the other (the same can be said of borders, which separate people only in order to better connect them). We must oppose to paralyzing anxiety the elegance of assumed risk. It is not when we flee adversity that we become strong. We must say no to the dogmatism of closed versus open and instead insist on porosity – on a proper interval between moderation and bravery, which alone allows creative shocks. We always find our relish for life in the collision between several spheres. As Victor Segalen once said: “I was asked to choose between a hammer and a bell; I confess that I have opted for the sound they made.”

[Easy_reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

La pandémie et son confinement ont eu le mérite de confirmer la tendance ; nous sommes définitivement passés du paradigme de la vie intense [1] à celui de la vie rabougrie. Dans son dernier essai, Pascal Bruckner semble regretter ce changement. Pas étonnant de la part de ce boomer soixante-huitard devenu un temps sarkozyste [2] Il préfère sans doute travailler plus pour gagner plus pour vivre plus (intensément). Une vie extraordinaire pour êtres exceptionnels, une vie faite d'expériences, d'explorations et d'expansion. Car « la vie est excès, elle est dilapidation ou elle n’est pas la vie. » Ce livre est celui d'un libertin qui défend le « corps à corps passionnant avec le réel ». La chair lui est chère. C'est un jouisseur qui recherche activement le plaisir. Il critique ainsi le casanier qui fait tout pour éviter la souffrance (du dehors) en consommant passivement et prudemment. Dans le monde de demain il faudra « limiter nos possessions, nos ambitions, nos déplacements ». Cette « grande rétractation » nous mènera au déclin.

Le déclinisme étant une idéologie de droite, cela confirme à mon avis le positionnement de Bruckner : de droite mais progressiste (il existe bien des conservateurs de gauche). C'est le coup classique du moderne qui critique la sagesse traditionnelle (la neutralisation des émotions fortes qui va avec est vue comme un renoncement, « une fuite lâche » [3]). Et pour cela il sort sa plus belle plume. Son sens de la formule est exceptionnel (mieux que Régis Debray [4] ou BHL [5]). Son style est très littéraire et son approche très philosophique. Il fait beaucoup appel à la religion également dans son analyse. Le problème c'est que son vocabulaire et ses références sont assez anciennes. Hors le cocon est désormais connecté, le solitaire dorénavant un techno-ermite. Cela change tout ! Il en parle bien sûr mais on sent que les technologies de l'information et de la communication ça n'est pas trop son truc (les écrans font écran). Le texte est court (162 pages) et qui plus est constitué de bref chapitres. Pourtant sa lecture a été laborieuse pour moi. Certains chapitres m'ont paru anecdotiques, à la limite du hors sujet parfois. Il faut cependant reconnaître à l'auteur son sens de la nuance. Il est même capable de faire un éloge de l'intérieur, de ses frontières faites non seulement de murs mais aussi de portes, permettant une circulation, un va-et-vient incessant. Elle est peut-être là la clé : ne pas rester dans une position excessive trop longtemps. Car que ce soit la pacification ou l'intensification de l'existence, il nous en faut de plus en plus.

On peut tenter de se rassurer en se disant que nous nous relâchons si nous le pouvons. Et que nous nous activons quand nous le devons. Mais on peut aussi s'inquiéter d'un passage brutal d'un extrême à l'autre : de la cabin fever au syndrome de la cabane. Notre fort intérieur pourrait alors effectivement devenir notre plus grande faiblesse.


_________________________________

[1] Garcia, Tristan. La vie intense; Une obsession moderne. Éditions Autrement, 2018. Coll. «Les Grands Mots»
[2] "Pascal Bruckner." Wikipédia, l'encyclopédie libre. 25 oct. 2022
[3] Garcia, Tristan. La vie intense; Une obsession moderne. Éditions Autrement, 2018. Coll. «Les Grands Mots»
[4] Debray, Régis. Eloge des frontières. Gallimard, 2013
[5] Lévy, Bernard-Henri. Ce virus qui rend fou. Grasset, 2020

[Colleen Newman]

Stopped reading at pg 10. dont need to hear another fail european man lament the cultural shift in which it is no longer acceptable to hug and kiss women without their consent :-)

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.5 stars*

Do you risk exploring a life in the public, or comfort yourself with the safe confinement of your personal space?

While inspired by life during covid, I wish the ideas had been less rooted in that time.

[Tsk Calder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, this was a Father’s Day gift from Seth on 16th June 2024. Now, is it the first book I’ve read since that Walter Isaacson biography of Elon Musk back at the end of February 2024? No. But there was and is the ongoing recovery, travels to Brazil and Greece, and working my way through all of those therapy Quiller novels and such gems as The Son of Man by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (highly recommended with some caveats). But here we are again.
The Preface highlights the Oblomov Hypothesis: a rich and idle man allowing himself to fall into idleness with resultant flabbiness, sleeping and resting to extremes, and ending his life “by simply settling down ‘quietly and gradually into the plain and spacious coffin’ that he has made for himself, with his own hands.” Pg X
Well, I ask you: what do you make of that? With my strong willingness to a grand suspension of disbelief, I see Oblomov constructing a coffin of a comfortable nature around himself, with minimal disturbance to his own comfort, in fact, only adding thereto. But hang on there, this is a completely idle man, barely disturbing himself for a bedpan, creating an artfully crafted wooden coffin with no tools nor love of the material used. He doesn’t feel the grain or finger the smoothness of the planed wood. True, if he had suddenly sensed a love of carpentry, his idleness might have been a thing of the past, but he doesn’t he creates what must be a strong coffin, strong to support his idle weight, and it is rendered comfortable. Credible only if he employed others. But the lie is in the words, “made for himself, with his own hands.” That is the end of the beautiful myth.
Of course, the story, such as it is, is about washing one’s hands, to cleanse, to accept that the possibility of Covid is to spread with far more ease than AIDS. Do we want to live in this world or do we seek its destruction? “Public life has gone from being the place of human exchange and commerce to that of suspicion. It’s a short distance from the caution required of us (vaccinations, health passports, washing) to the destruction of our bonds. Covid has resurrected the two great modern phobias: paranoia, the fear of the other; and hypochondria, the fear of the self – the certainty that our body carries within it the germ or the disease that will kill it.” Pg9
In my own writing I am minded of the mental restraints of HIV / AIDS and the old saying that life is a sexually transmitted disease that is always terminal. Beware!
“More and more, to exist means to withdraw.” Pg17 Watching from a motorway bridge, the rush of vehicles in each direction used to make me wonder what an alien would make of these people going from A to B and from B to A – why not simply delegate the responsibility for the function the one to the other and avoid the apparently pointless hurry-scurry of the movement. But the observation by an alien is predicated on travel. Ants are fantastic the way they work together to produce a common result. Yet, we don’t aspire to be ants, the individuality lost in the common goal. Good spirit. Lousy result.
Where the pandemic lockdowns might be compared to an enforced monasticism, the book is about “Indoor life instead of inner life” Pg17 and, of course, forced immobility can make us virtuous about our reduced carbon footprint. I am immediately minded of an Armchair Theatre type of (I think BBC but it was actually ITV running from 1956 to 1974) presentation, and similarly there were the BBC Play for Today with great directors like Ken Loach, and please don’t forget an early favourite of mine, The Long Distance Piano Player starring Ray Davies of The Kinks, living on in my memory, along with the aliens visiting earth, the aliens replicating humans in every detail except scale, and thus their spaceship condemned to be trodden underfoot into the mud by one of the welcoming committee, and the one about the respectable middle class chap who leaves home to be a musical poet (Jericho comes to mind) and then the one I’m thinking of, and relevant to this book, the one where people lived in isolation in pods. Sad but possible. And here’s the rub: in my mind memory, those pods are in fact enlarged phones, within which we live. What a thought. That’s lockdown writ large.
The desire to cut our carbon footprint can result in curbing exploration. “Many within the environmental movement are already warning against a return to traditional tourism, which they view as an aberration drowning in its own success [don’t tell the Vikings]. Didn’t the Green Party mayor of Poitiers, Léonore Moncond’huy, decide in April of 2021, for the benefit of the planet, to cut subsidies to the association Rêves de gosse – Childhood Dreams – which allows disabled children to fly for the first time?” Pg18
Ah well, it just shows the need to temper theory with humanity, by which I mean goodliness. Like “a picture is worth a thousand words” where it is important to check the framing of the picture, not least for what is omitted (my favourite Lacunae theory) the use of an extreme example may be apposite in forming opinion, but is it the relevant factor and is it scaled in the mind of the reader or is it disproportionately loaded information? That’s why we often comment that the truth lies somewhere in the middle ground.
The question is begged in Chapter 4: Is a Banal Life Worth Living? Pg24 “Didn’t Hegel explain that the genius of Protestantism was to bind the faithful to the ordinariness of life?” Pg24 And this edges into my own predilections. I have been criticised by a school friend, and repeated again just a year ago, for the perceived thought of over-thinking things. I scratch my head, not recognising the problem. If simple acceptance is the way to an easy life, I have failed, many times, and continue to do so. When in my twenties, with young children, I mused that life would be grand if I just went to work, got home to bathe the kids, read a story, and happy ever after. But it wasn’t me. I always craved something else. Born in Yorkshire, my dad told me to get an education and leave. I did. But nobody told me that there could be limits. From my dad granting me the freedom to move. My own children, now old themselves, seem the keener to limit and prescribe my sentiments, while at the same time as trying to limit my thoughts, they fail to recognise my physical frailties, putting real limits on what I can and can’t do, leaving me to feel that I’ve failed. Not the best basis for good thoughts. So, the desire for a simple life may be revered but not necessarily satisfying. I scratch the itch of my infirmities. I swaddle my dreams in new-found practicalities, the impracticalities of my eyes being far larger than my stomach, known but not acknowledged, I struggle to accept the easily perceived limitations of a body supported by copious medications. Rattle and roll it may be but it ain’t the spirit. The music dies, but I still crave the new.
Pascal Bruckner’s words, “imbued with an irrepressible melancholy that … bears witness to an abysmal emptiness” Pg26 make me recognise my innermost fear of being no longer relevant. Life casts its shadow. Where my desire for that grand life of fitting in to the ideal, the bath time idyll, I was far more frightened by the possibility of fitting in so well that I was lost: “Life turned ordinary once we became children of the calendar and the payroll, once our existence was broken down into weeks, months and payslips.” Pg26 My desire to avoid the ‘work out of time’ dilemma, the clocking on and off to get the money to live the real life in our own time, but after private ablutions, family responsibilities, and, of course, sleep, is there anything left?
Yes, that frightened me. But how to bridge that gap betwixt a form of security, the payslip, and the desire to do more, and look after the family. A balancing act. And now we restrict the possibilities with the threats of Climate and Pestilence. What a way to live. Still, make of it the best we can. Will Pascal Bruckner both expose and solve the dichotomies of modern life? And, yet, there have always been diseases and feudal abuses. The real question is how do we encourage and fortify thought amidst all these large imponderables? Having recognised that, has anything really changed? Or is it a simple question of scale? Do I need larger slippers? The increased scale alone can be daunting, but ne’er impossible to overcome. There’s a glimmering brightness on the horizon. Time for me to keep on reading.
Oh, oh, time to introduce stress (I have read ahead a little as I write). “And as man replaced God as the foundation of the law during the French Revolution, daily life gained a certain autonomy. Its meaning is no longer written in advance. We have a degree of freedom to innovate: it depends on us, and us alone, to give direction to our lives. And thus, life can improvise, but it can also engage in repetition, limiting itself to endlessly doing the same things. Sometimes our days, which are all alike, begin to stutter. It is thus that banality is born …” Pg26 “The more things return, identical to themselves, the more they overwhelm us. Each day is a replica of the previous one and an anticipation of the next one, which is a perfect description of stress [my emphasis] – the microscopic war of attrition made up of annoyances and minor worries.” Pg27 Bruckner continues by quoting Jean-Paul Sartre. (How could he fail to get my attention and enter my bloodstream? My first interest in philosophy came from reading Nausea and then The Roads to Freedom when I was seventeen. I saw it as an illustrative philosophy.) “‘When you live,’ writes Sartre in Nausea, ‘nothing happens. Settings change, people come and go, and that’s it. There are no beginnings. Days are added to days without rhyme or reason, in an interminable and monotonous addition.’” Pg 27
Bruckner is describing world weariness: that “modern form of fatigue.: Pg 27 “What we need to combat stress isn’t calm but an actual event – an escape from ourselves.” Pg29 The enforced lockdown nothingness avoided the being of life. So, having plagiarised Sartre’s tome, Being and Nothingness, I feel comfortable in turning to my favourite Alexander Pope quotation, ‘The ruling passion be what it will, the ruling passion conquers reason still.’ We need the kickstart of passion for us to experience life. That is the modern dilemma, emphasised in scale by the pandemic lockdowns encouraging an inertia, which it takes effort to break its bonds, the bonds that are strengthened by the soporific ease of substituting the smart phone for real events. Life is for the living. Don’t forget!
Bruckner now tackles that thing we seem to love and love to hate, the ubiquitous cell (smart) phone. “It brings the world (messages, news, music, films) into our homes, which is undeniably an enormous advancement, but it also makes the world superfluous, since I have it in the palm of my hand. It comes to me, and I no longer need to go to it.” Pg32 Enough said and written: the smart phone is not a panacea, it is a symptom of loneliness in the midst of a swirling mass of people; it is the modern drug necessary in forcing attention over activity. Yes, it occupies the mind but is that enough?
So, think of a song: For Your Love is my choice. “I’ll bring you diamond rings and things right to your door – to thrill you with delight – dream of me at night – for your love” – yes, the Yardbirds and then a great execution by Steve Marriott (he of The Small Faces) and Humble Pie. Now, all of that can be brought on a phone, and not only right to your door, but well inside. But as in the start to my novel Homedoubting, wouldn’t you rather see the effort of creation and the delivery of Freesias by push bike? Things may be widely accessible, but the sweat is appreciated. So, the diamond rings are for weighing in the love balance, not for screen balance alone. How annoying is it to watch people filming on a phone when being there is the thrill. It’s called a live performance for the very reason that it is live. Why does filming it make it real? Or more real. It isn’t credible just to say that you were there. Will you really watch that recording? Probably not, but you are using memory and I’m minded of Mr Jeremiah Colman’s comment that the yellow English mustard left on the side of your plate is his profit. How many people now contribute to Apple and Google profits for the cloud storage used? Many, I sense. Profit created by a fear of loss.
So, the question revolves around home and hearth versus the wilderness of the great outdoors, the inner life of contemplation versus the wild life of activity [the well-written Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams comes to mind] and the messianic desire to wander being essential to attaining godliness. How does religion react to the everyday? “Protestants replaced prayer with work, making the latter a quasi-religious act [see The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber], and accused monks of being parasites who grew fat at the expense of the faithful [‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ Kate Moss – clearly not reciprocated by the jolly rotundness of the Buddha] and sank into licentiousness …” Pg39
“Shutting yourself away in a room does not mean abandoning the outside world: it means putting it on hold so as to return to it in a better way. If the house becomes an isolation cell, it destroys the enthralling physical engagement we have with reality; it ceases to be a dwelling and becomes a bunker, a fortified encampment.” Pg 42 The redoubt as both stockade and prison: how we use the resource determines the outcome.
Bruckner now takes us on a journey through history, the notion of comfort and private space, diving into Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own – ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ Which takes me back to my mother lecturing me on rights, as expressed in Lacunae (Missing, Most Likely, Happily, Dead) with my being told that the Suffragettes were awarded a mere token with the 1918 vote as it applied only to moneyed, landed spinsters, for on marriage the assets went to the man and the woman was a mere chattel. In UK local elections women didn’t get full voting rights until the 1950s. But I sense that Bruckner is padding the mattress in equating personal freedoms with luxury and privacy in analysing the ‘withdrawal from the World’ – interesting points but not totally cause and effect, more indicative, and sometimes preconditions in creating a society able to purchase and use the smart phone.
So, along with Covid we have the super-rich and the super-poor with ‘the rancid smell of desolation.’ Pg49 No matter the living arrangement, “We live our lives online – what a strange expression. In the old days, writing lines was a form of punishment at school. Now when we speak of lines, it means being connected to the world via codes. From within this intimate agora, we speak to everyone while remaining alone and immobile.” Pg51
But when does the sanctuary become a prison?
What ancient practice combines the Zen of knowledge wafting through the air waves with the practicalities of existence? Why, sleep, of course. That activity which evades us when we are seeking it and comes upon us when we are simply unabsorbed. “Some people sleep their lives away and experience their sleep as if it were their real existence, turning their bed into a precursor to the shroud.” Pg58 Well, I’m not sure of why we have to go to the shroud, the death part, even if sleep is also seen as a survived mini-death (an extended form of orgasm?). I refer you to my character Adam, who is convinced that he lives in Bungalowland when he sleeps, an American idyll where he lives a parallel life. Always possible, if unlikely. Some people just have to be busy, even when asleep, just to be meaningful. “It’s important to have sleep discipline, and it would be a great idea to rehabilitate the siesta, which interrupts excessive activity and recharges the brain.” Pg59 I think Bruckner has missed the power-napping debate – probably too busy on-line! Personally, I love napping but fear I do it too often and too long: I need that discipline aspect sharpened.
What next? Bruckner jumps from the sinuous personal sleep to the gargantuan large-scale world observed on the screen. “Two things have changed since the beginning of the twenty-first century: a politics of fear, for fear and by way of fear has emerged on a global scale, driven in particular by the UN and NGOs around climate, terrorism, and pandemics, which is creating a feeling of global insecurity.” Pg61/62 The scale of the matter can be massaged and rapidly inflated by 24/7 news. These are not new things but a feeling of being wrapped up in them is generated by our hyperactive communication devices, forcing reaction, even though the effect of our attention isn’t communicated: it isn’t dialogue, it is one way traffic. The dichotomy is the sense of belonging in the moment is only alive when we are connected on-line, and the isolation of ourselves when that connection is broken can be difficult to manage. We aren’t aware of the extent, the scale, of our being participating and willing victims. Tough old world out there. You will probably need more than slippers to prevail.
When I went to University, many moons ago, I was asked where I bought my fabulously faded jeans. I looked blank. They were the jeans I’d worked in on the roads, worn, old, holed and patched with numerous washes. Who’d want them if they could afford new ones? Many did. Then, looking around at the rebellious youth, uniformity dominates with its own form of conformity, just different styles, as heralded by The Kinks and Dedicated Follower of Fashion. “What is a slipper? The domesticated extension of the shoe or boot, the transformation of the walking foot into the sleeping foot: the means of locomotion has become a means of stagnation.” Pg74
Oh dear, I fear Bruckner doesn’t recognise the slippers and a blanket as a means of keeping warm as the heating bills soar. Dressing gowns get short shrift, but Diderot’s old gown is elevated into a necessary work tool. How we describe, or name, a thing defines it and that is why language is a living tool invested with the current belief. Oh, and dressing for others is sidestepped if you have an avatar.
So, we whip through several novels and writers focusing on the minutiae of a room, and then the weather, and the ubiquitous days, the one after the other, but, stop! This is where Bruckner misses his grand denouement: if the days are all the same, why is there an uneven number of days in the year, with the little leftover bits being wrapped up with an extra day in the l

[Dariana · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rolled my eyes the entire time. The author critizes everything that is going on in this world, but not in a construcitve or educational way. Random facts and quotes poorly sewn together to prove the author's grim view while leaving the impression he is above all judgement.

[Javier · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 *
The Triumph of the Slippers: On the Withdrawal from the World, what a long name, and like most philosophy books that I tend to read: there is a reading level.

In particular, my understanding of this book is not at 100%. Some names and references I didn't fully grip and other topics I was out of the loop. And saying that, I still understood a good amount of Bruckner's stance on -The World- withdrawing itself from the outside or better said: The world giving in to it's most comfy.

Bruckner discussed the *recent* wavering agoraphobia that the world is finding itself in because of anxiety, depression, lack of activities, lack of danger, excess of comfort and safety, recent sensitivities that make the majority of the present population vulnerable to nonexistant problems, fading culture, technology, and many many more things.

He didn't write without leaving short history lessons in every chapter about how we got this way and where we started. For example, single bedrooms, the ones that held 1 man and 1 women for privacy and marriage reasons didn't exist *commonly* until the late 18th century EVER. Private housing wasn't commonplace till very late besides the rich who were also supervised. Privacy was rare and unique. Bruckner points out today that privacy continues to be rare and unique due to things being prodcasted out onto social media for relatability and understanding; many's personal diary shared online for others to judge or pity.

I'm glad that I read it, I don't fully know what the author wants from the reader after reading it but all I can do is think about what he has put out on paper and move on and look back if necessary.

[Sm G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Приятное в этой книжке - крупный шрифт и карманность.

Поначалу на полях писал, в чем автор не прав. Потом перестал: или он намерено так, чтобы задевало и хотелось спорить, или старик безнадёжно устарел. В любом случае, новых или интересных идей к середине не обнаружил.

[Alec Walter · Rating 4 out of 5]

The authors comments on Ukraine have proved unfortunately clairvoyant.

[marian gilmore · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chaque cinq minutes jai devu rappeler que je lis puisque mon pensee a ete ailleurs 😪