But whether it’s possible to make such oddkin or not, we know what drives the pursuit: a profound desire to engage and reckon with otherness, without eliminating that otherness.

that power arises in some cases from likeness—from the sense that that could be me speaking—and from difference—that is someone very different from me speaking. For mental and moral health we need both.

In this way, Rosa contends, we find ourselves in a state of “frenetic standstill,” constantly in motion but going nowhere.

She thinks it’s a valuable exercise to project ourselves imaginatively into the mental and emotional world of people from the past: not to think of what we would do if we were in that situation, but of how that experience felt, immediately, to them, to people shaped and formed as they were.

Moreover, as Simone Weil points out in a passage I quoted early in this book, the future we imagine is just that: not an alien anything, but what we imagine, what we can imagine. And often it’s what we can’t imagine that we’re most in need of.

We may not know that we can change the default settings of the media machine; we may know but lack the time and energy to do so. And so those settings continue to reinforce the presentism that they’re claiming merely to reflect. By reading and considering the past, we cut through the thick, strong vines that bind our attention to the things of the

it really is far too easy for us to map old books and their authors onto our familiar, comfortable categories—“inspirational texts,” “meditation, mindfulness, and other spiritual exercises”—a mapping that renders us unable to hear a strange word, a different word, a word that takes us beyond what we already know.

I believe that any significant increase in personal density is largely achieved through encounters with un-likeness.

When we speak our thought, we want more than agreement, we want addition: we want our friend to develop that thought, or to push back at it, if ever so gently.