Aimlessness (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780231199353)

Our culture values striving, purpose, achievement, and accumulation. This book asks us to get sidetracked along the way. It praises aimlessness as a source of creativity and an alternative to the demand for linear, efficient, instrumentalist thinking and productivity.

Aimlessness collects ideas and stories from around the world that value indirection, wandering, getting lost, waiting, meandering, lingering, sitting, laying about, daydreaming, and other ways to be open to possibility, chaos, and multiplicity. Tom Lutz considers aimlessness as a fundamental human proclivity and method, one that has been vilified by modern industrial societies but celebrated by many religious traditions, philosophers, writers, and artists. He roams a circular path that snakes and forks down sideroads, traipsing through modernist art, nomadic life, slacker comedies, drugs, travel, nirvana, and oblivion. The book is structured as a recursive, disjunctive spiral of short sections, a collage of narrative, anecdotal, analytic, and lyrical passages--intended to be read aimlessly, to wind up someplace unexpected.

Author: Tom Lutz
ISBN-10: 023119935X
ISBN-13: 9780231199353
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/26/2021
Pages: 184
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.40w x 1.10d