Third space

 

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 4^th 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.