ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that a ground populated solely by people and objects, and a sky that is empty but for birds and clouds, can exist only within a simulacrum of the world, modelled in an interior space. It explains that in the open world, beings relate not as closed, objective forms but by virtue of their common immersion in the fluxes of the medium. Thus, finally, to inhabit the open is to dwell within a weather-world in which every being is destined to combine wind, rain, sunshine and earth in the continuation of its own existence. The chapter provides some remarks on how, in modern western societies, the environment has been engineered, or ‘built’, to conform to expectations of closure, but how life always, and inevitably, breaks through the bounds of the objective forms in which people have sought to contain it.
