After private and public spaces? Before the fourth
room in the house to be claimed by women? (The drawing room, kitchen and
bedroom are the usual spaces at home, with women mostly found in the latter
two. Feminists, starting from Virginia Wolfe have urged women to find their own
space at home and it is called the fourth room. In this room, armed with 500
pounds a year as their private income, women could begin by killing the angel
in the house, said Wolfe.)
Not quite. Third space denotes the large grey area
that lies in between binary options. Society compels us to choose either/or,
yes/no in many situations but to assert our free will, it is important to take
recourse to the third space. This space is for refuseniks who are tired of
conventions and want something different. The least they can do is to show that
binaries are inadequate.
Ralph Waldo Thoreau, Herman Melville’s Bartleby and
Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic philosopher who lived in 4th century
BC in Athens and Corinth are all heirs to a strand in Greek thought that prized
the capacity for individual reason over the hypocrisy of traditions and customs.
They consistently did the opposite of what people expected.
Ordinary people gave up on them, even called them mad
but they all are important figures and their message lures many till date. It
of course, takes courage to act on one’s convictions and to ignore the ridicule
which is the stock response of common people to the unexpected. We need them to
realize that there are alternatives and there are cracks in the crushing weight
of habit, custom and tradition. Refuseniks tell us that it is important to
refuse and they show how to refuse. We assert our individuality and free will
by refusing. Thoreau shunned society and stayed by himself amidst nature but
Diogenes was a part of his society. He neither assimilated nor exited society;
he lived in the midst of it, in a permanent state of refusal.
I have parsed the above from Jenny Odell’s How to
do nothing, resisting the attention economy, Melville House Publishing, NY,
2019.
I found this analysis very illuminating as it helped
me understand my late father’s personality. He ridiculed all conventions and
stereotypes and refused most binaries. He loved to do the unexpected. For
example, he wanted to listen only to Pandit Bhimsen Joshi who sang last in the 3-day
long Sawai Gandharva music festival. He calculated that with the usual delays, Bhimsen
would start in the early hours of the fourth day and so he paid a visit on the
fourth morning. Unfortunately, the concert was over then and everybody filing
out of the shamiana, looked askance at this fresh, smiling figure!
He always thought about things on his own and thought
about many facets of a given thing and he approached it from different perspectives.
I have inherited his resistance and refusal but, in my case, it is always an
instinctive response and I am a very poor thinker as compared to my father.
