A Philosophy of Walking
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 1781688370
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” —Nietzsche
In A Philosophy of Walking, a bestseller in France, leading thinker Frédéric Gros charts the many different ways we get from A to B – the pilgrimage, the promenade, the protest march, the nature ramble – and reveals what they say about us.
Gros draws attention to other thinkers who also saw walking as something central to their practice. On his travels he ponders Thoreau’s eager seclusion in Walden Woods; the reason Rimbaud walked in a fury, while Nerval rambled to cure his melancholy. He shows us how Rousseau walked in order to think, while Nietzsche wandered the mountainside to write. In contrast, Kant marched through his hometown every day, exactly at the same hour, to escape the compulsion of thought. Brilliant and erudite, A Philosophy of Walking is an entertaining and insightful manifesto for putting one foot in front of the other.
From the Hardcover edition.
is still expressed in the vocabulary of regeneration: very often there is a spring, stream or river close to holy places, the lustral element in which pilgrims can immerse themselves, to emerge purified, as it were cleansed of themselves. A well-known instance is the annual Hindu festival in the upper Ganges. As an example of this utopia of rebirth through walking, I would cite the pilgrimage to Mount Kailash in Tibet, a splendidly solitary mountain, a dome of ice sitting on an immense plateau,
colours. Thus, by Swann’s house was the outing risked even in threatening weather since it was short, the festoons of lilacs to be gently embraced, the hawthorns with their intoxicating scent, Swann’s park where sometimes there might appear from between hedges of jasmine, the scoffing young girl Gilberte, impenetrable and wily. The Guermantes outing involved leaving by the back door at the end of the garden, and needed reliable weather because it led far off. Guermantes was essentially a
available on the great market of endless demand. The reign of generalized prostitution, of selling, and selling yourself. The urban stroller is subversive. He subverts the crowd, the merchandise and the town, along with their values. The walker of wide-open spaces, the trekker with his rucksack opposes civilization with the burst of a clean break, the cutting edge of a rejection (Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, etc.). The stroller’s walking activity is more ambiguous, his resistance to modernity
Robb, Rimbaud, Pan Macmillan, 2001. 7. SOLITUDES Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Or Life in the Woods), Wilder Publications, 2008. 8. SILENCES The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837–1861, NYRB Classics, 2009. Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes & The Amateur Emigrant, Penguin Classics, 2004. 9. THE WALKER’S WAKING DREAMS – ROUSSEAU Maurice Cranston, The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity, University of Chicago Press, 1997.
While from above, from a detached position, one understands what made mankind sick: the poison of sedentary moralities. Then too, during very long walks, there is always that emergence through a high pass where another landscape appears all of a sudden. After the effort, the long climb, the body turns round and sees at its feet the offered immensity; or, at a turn in the path, it witnesses a transformation: a range of mountains, a splendour lying in wait. Many aphorisms are built on these