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Wandelen. Een Filosofische Gids (2009)

by Frédéric Gros(Favorite Author)

3.75 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

9023477340 (ISBN13: 9789023477341)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

De Bezige Bij

review 1: Alternating between meditations on walking as a way to achieve psychological and mental liberty, and poignant stories about famous walkers (Rousseau, Kant, Rambeau, Nieztsche, Thoreau, etc.), Frédéric Gros provides a lightly worn erudite version of the old Zeppelin injunction to "Ramble On." Gros clearly favors the experience of extra-urban walking, most preferably in solitude, as providing a space for clarity of thinking. What he loves about walking is precisely that it is monotonous: "But the secret of that monotony is that it constitutes a remedy for boredom. Boredom is immobility of the body confronted with emptiness of mind. The repetitiveness of walking eliminates boredom, for, with the body active, the mind is no longer affected by its lassitude, no longer draws f... morerom its inertia the vague vertigo of an endless spiral." (157)In the end, I liked his portraits of other intellectuals' relationship to walking more than the abstracted philosophical musings on the value(s) of walking. And while I am out of sympathy with his retro-Romantic hostility to the city and his view of the fláneur as basically a symptom of the alienation of urban life, this passage on Walter Benjamin is very well observed: The "poetic creativity [of the flâneur's dérive] retains its ambiguous quality: it is, Benjamin said, a 'fantasmagoria'. It bypasses the awfulness of the city to recapture its passing marvels, it explores the poetry of collisions, but without stopping to denounce the alienation of labour and the masses. The flâneur has better things to do: remythologize the city, invent new divinities, explore the poetic surface of the urban spectacle." (180)
review 2: While I love to read non fiction, and read on average three books per week (we don't have a tv), its rare that I find a book that draws me back over and over, to re-read. This is one of those rare books.Love walking myself, but never stopped to consider how it effected my way of thinking. Now I do. Kant,Nietzsche, Thoreau, Jesus, Gandhi and many others are in this book. Some walked with others like Gandhi and Jesus, but many preferred to walk alone. Some with a walking stick, some with their hand folded or in their pockets. Some preferred remote areas, others were drawn to river and mountains. Some walked to also relieve depression or physical pain. And folks like Nietzsche had a set time of day. Some walked for hours and hours, sometimes daily. Whereas some did brief walks that were akin to a daily vitamin. Then there were those like Jesus and Gandhi who walked for days, weeks and months, often for a cause for change.Will never look at my walking the same way again. And will even borrow some of the thinking these folks used to make their walks more productive mind, body or spirit. less

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