Critica della camminata pura (ossia senza ragione).

Noi non siamo di quelli che riescono a pensare solo in mezzo ai libri, sotto la scossa di libri - e' nostra consuetudine pensare all'aria aperta, camminando, saltando, salendo, danzando, preferibilmente su monti solitari o sulla riva del mare, laddove sono le vie stesse a farsi meditabonde. Nietzsche (23)

Andiamo, cappello, mantella, i pugni in tasca e usciamo.
Avanti, forza!
Andiamo!
Rimbaud (51)

Spesso l'uomo che incontro m'insegna meno del silenzio che lui stesso rompe.
Thoreau (63)

Ecco: camminare e' accompagnare il tempo, mettersi al suo passo come si fa con un bambino. (79)

Paesaggi, in Nerval, di castelli e di torri merlate, masse rosse mobili dei boschetti sul verde delle valli, dorature aranciate dei tramonti. Alberi, sempre alberi. Paesaggi piatti come un sonno. Le nebbie azzurrine del mattino fanno comparire fantasmi in ogni dove. Le sere d'ottobre sono d'oro vecchio. Vi si cammina come in sogno, lentamente, senza sforzo (pochi rilievi accidentati). Lo scricchiolio delle goglie morte. (149-50)

Alle cinque del pomeriggio, si sapeva che Kant sarebbe uscito a fare la sua passeggiata. Era come un rito immutabile, regolare e capitale come il sorgere del sole. (160)
Probabilmente, come si e' sempre letto, erano le tre del pomeriggio.

Non c'e' modo di essere piu' terreni che marciando: la monotonia smisurata del suolo. (182)

La marcia permette quel rapporto deciso con se' stessi che non appartiene all'ordine dell'introspezione indefinita (quest'ultima preferisce la posizione sdraiata su un divano), ma a quello dell'esame meticoloso. (193)

Manca Hemingway, che scriveva in piedi. ( )

I cannot say enough good things about this book! There is usually a book I go wild for each year and this is this year's book. It will be given to friends who will appreciate and wind up adoring this book. Granted, this is not a book for everyone though.
This is truly a philosophy book and it says it right in the title. This is a book about the essence of walking, the experience of walking, the disdain of walking, and famous walking philosophers. Due to this, it is not a mass market book.
I am a contemplative who enjoys thinking while walking or running. I resonated with many of the points the author made about slowing down, enjoying the essence of life, and breathing it all in. This hit every pleasure nerve in my contemplative body, hence the excitement behind this book. This is a book about why we walk and the experience of walking rather than about walking.
If you enjoy philosophy, contemplation, and really deep and rich writing, walk (don't run) and grab this one. My first truly exciting 5 star of the year. ( )

Summary: An extended reflection on the significance of walking as part of the human condition, consisting of short chapters interspersed with accounts of walking philosophers.

During the pandemic, the daily walk, usually about an hour before the last light of the day, has become part of my pandemic routine. It is the time I de-compress from a day of zoom calls and other activities that usually involve sitting in front of a computer. I need to move my body and clear my head. Sometimes I pray, sometimes I think, sometimes I notice the effects of the changing seasons on the yards of my neighbors. And sometimes I’m just present, putting one foot in front of the other in this most basic of human activities.

It turns out I’m hardly the first to reflect on something we’ve been doing since late in our first year of life. Frédéric Gros is a philosopher at the University of Paris, specializing in the philosophy of Michel Foucault. In this work, Gros explores the meaning of walking, the different ways and reasons we walk, and offers vignettes of other philosophers for whom walking was important. Each chapter is headed with finely drawn illustrations reflecting the chapter theme.

He begins by reminding us that walking is not a sport. We don’t keep track of rankings or times (although walking apps actually do this, which seems to be a good way to ruin a good walk). He observes: “Walking is the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found.” He considers the freedom of walking and the reversal of our normal indoor lives, especially on long walks where we spend our days outdoors and only shelter indoors, or sometimes in a tent we carry. Basic to walking is its slowness that lengthens and enriches time. He discusses the paradox of solitary walking, in which we are actually more aware of the company of the world about us. Even when we walk with others, we enjoy solitude as our paces vary. We embrace silence as the chatter of our days falls away. We experience states of well-being.

Gros considers various kinds of walks beginning with the ultimate walk, the pilgrimage, the walk that symbolizes our journey through life. Pilgrims embark to bear witness to and deepen their faith, and sometimes to expiate their sins. Over a couple of chapters he considers some of the most significant pilgrimage routes in various parts of the world. Then he turns to the Cynics, whose walks are a kind of protest against all the conventions of human society.

At the opposite end of walking is the stroll, probably describing the kind of walks that are part of my daily routine (as well as the philosopher Kant–although don’t set your clocks by mine!). Then there are the promenades in public gardens and the flaneurs, strolling and stopping to gaze at the crowds and the scene. That might describe our teen years at the local shopping mall!

Gros breaks up his musings on walking with vignettes on philosophers who walked. Most fascinating, and perhaps the most disturbing was Nietzsche, who walked to relieve his terrible headaches, who composed some of his greatest works while walking, and whose physical and mental decline corresponded with an eventual paralysis that ended his walks, his work, and his life. We meet the poet Rimbaud whose walking led to a swelled knee requiring amputation, which led to his death. We trace the passage from morning to night in Rousseau’s life, from the exaltation of his youth evident in Confessions, to the increasing solitude of his middle years when he identified himself as homo viator, and finally the last walks in the evening of life around Paris, when he wrote Reveries.

Thoreau’s writings are filled with his walks. We meet the melancholy Nerval who in the end hangs himself. Perhaps the great contrast to so many of these is Kant who loved his work and his table and adhered to a disciplined schedule people could set their clocks by. Gros contends that the monotony of bodily effort liberated the mind, that the regularity of walking fueled the steady and massive output of thought, and its inescapability reflected a will working steadily toward the arrival at an end. Most inspiring, perhaps was his account of Gandhi, who walked and marched throughout his life, a picture of simply keeping going.

It was fascinating how important walking was to the work of these philosophers. Yet walking was far from a panacea it seems–in some cases like Rimbaud, a contributing factor to his death. I wonder if there was something in walking, and this is apparent in Thoreau and Gandhi, of life stripped to its essentials, its marrow. I wonder if we also walk in an awareness of the shadow of death, walking while we can in the awareness of the coming day when we will be unable.

Frédéric Gros has given us a book filled with reflections of why we walk, stroll, go for hikes, embark on pilgrimages. He invites us to not leave our walking unexamined but to live in awareness of this elemental practice capable of giving us joy, wonder, clear minds, and awareness of our nature and destiny. ( )

This is another entry in what I’ve come to think of as "Craig Mod books," reflections on walking and what that activity does to thought through the body. I initially read Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust on his recommendation from that essay and loved it. It treated walking as something with a history, with many purposes in time and in different cultures, and treated those purposes with respect and a genuine criticality that reflected the impossibility of covering as broad a concept as "walking" in a book only a couple hundred pages long.

A Philosophy of Walking is something ostensibly in this vein, but it’s more poetic and abstract, more distant. It opens with language like, "Walking is the best way to go more slowly than any other method than has ever been found" and "what liberates you from time and space alienates you from speed." I feel these things in walking. But I wonder how useful any of this is to people who have never walked in the woods a ways.

What I mean is that by walking you are not going to meet yourself. By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. ... The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life.

That’s lovely. And vague. I feel what he’s saying. I can easily lose myself in these reveries, and the book feels like that’s the point of reading it. But I don’t understand it, because the path up to that point is surely part of the history of the body that led the sensing mind there. In a chapter called "Silences," he says, "Walking: it hits you at first like an immense breathing in the ears. You feel the silence as if it were a great fresh wind blowing away clouds."

The book’s real meat comes in reflections on history’s beloved walkers: Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Rousseau, Thoreau, Nerval, Gandhi. All (troubled) men. The histories are fractured in a way that I think the reader is supposed to know about these men and what they’ve done, or at least their stature in the skyline of western thought. These histories are also tightly coupled with walking and the liberation walking provides to the (hurt) mind. He leaves out details about the way some of the people treated the people around them that don’t fit the mold of romantic reveries about philosophy, literature, and the mind and body.

And then come passages like these:

Among the sources of morning, we find the West. The East is where our memory resides: the East is culture and books, history and old defeats. There is nothing to be learned from the past, because learning from that means repeating former errors.

This claim flops about the page, undiscussed. I hate it.

Nerval has this quality of dreamy melancholy: slow rambles awakening ghosts from earlier times, kindly women’s faces. And the certainty, when walking, of a childhood spent only and always in this light. Not nostalgia for lost years, nor nostalgia for childhood, but childhood itself as nostalgia (only children know the miracle of nostalgia without a past).

What the hell does that mean? But in the same vein, this description of pleasure felt correct:

Pleasure is a matter of encountering. It is a possibility of feeling that finds completion in an encounter with a body, element or substance. That is all there is to pleasure: agreeable sensations, sweet, unprecedented, deliciously unexpected, wild ... It is always some sensation, and always triggered by an encounter, by something that confirms, from outside, the possibilities inscribed in our bodies. Pleasure is the encounter with the good object: the one that causes a possibility of feeling to blossom.

He goes on to describe habituation, and the clarity of reflection that becoming accustomed to some pleasure can provide. He does this in fittingly pleasurable prose.

The book is a pleasurable read. It’s better to think of this as a kind of reverie of walking, poems reflecting a walking body, just set in text and contextualized in history. As an exhaustive reference, it’s poor; it’s uncritical both of its subjects and the whole subject of walking, which only recently became accessible and safe to women, and even then only in limited contexts. It doesn’t attempt to describe the history of walking itself, a history of the difference between the societal views of the kind of walking a medieval pilgrim was doing (the subject of one of its chapters) and what Rousseau was doing (also a chapter). I’m glad I read Wanderlust before this otherwise I would be pregnant with questions throughout. This lack of criticality shows in the sense that the author wrote a book in 2011 using "he" everywhere, and the translator chose to maintain that. He uses phrases like "Oriental" poorly and without the specificity that a nine-year-old with five minutes and an iPhone could provide. Never mind the constant ableism and lack of discussion of disability and how that relates to the reverential headspace he seems intent on maintaining.

If you like walking and have read Wanderlust, this might be nice. Don’t read it if you haven’t read Wanderlust: it’s important to know the vast chasms this book leaves out to maintain its sense of reverie and abstraction.
( )

A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros is an enlightening look into the most basic form of human transportation. Gros is a French philosopher who specializes in Michel Foucault. He is a professor of political philosophy at the University of Paris XII and the Institute of Political Studies of Paris.

Walking one of the simplest acts a person can complete. We depend on it and rarely think of it. Gros argues it is more than just a form of transport; it, in a way, defines us. Today, we think of walking simply as a means the takes us from one place to another. The start and the destination are the important parts. Walking is just a means to get to our ends.

American Indians walked barefoot so that they would stay in contact with the earth that nourishes everything including the walker through direct contact. Walking should connect the walker with nature. It is becoming one with your surroundings. Nietzsche walked for hours on end; it disconnected him from the world around him. His ideas came to him while walking, and walking was a type of mediation where ideas became clear and could be written later. It may not be surprising that Nietzsche's insanity did not begin until he was unable to continue his walks. Thoreau was at one with nature and walked. Rousseau had to walk, and he walked all over Europe. “I was young, and in good health; I had sufficient money and abundant hopes; I traveled on foot and I traveled alone.” Rimbaud walked when he was poor and to escape. After he lost part of his leg he waited impatiently for his wooden prosthesis so he could resume his walking. Kant never walked far, but he walked everyday. For Kant, walking was cleansing. It was a break from the musty indoors of the library. It is said he walked the same loop in the park for years, only deviating from it twice. His path became known as the “Philosopher's Walk.”

There are other reasons for walking. Pilgrimages are a reason for walking. Christian pilgrims went to to sites to give thanks to God. The sites were usually a great distance so the walk became a form of payment for good fortune. Pilgrims traveled simply. A walking stick, a pouch to hold documents and meager rations, a broad brimmed hat, and a large cape. The pouch was made of leather to remind the pilgrim of his mortality and the pouch was always open because the pilgrim was required to share. Other pilgrimages were for penance. A priest might assign a pilgrimage as penance for sins. The graver the sins the longer the pilgrimage. Here walking is still a connection with nature, but the church's definition of nature.

Walking follows us into modern times. Gandhi walked with the masses for freedom. We can walk with purpose even in the cities. Rather than connecting with nature, it is a blocking of modern distraction to try and achieve that feeling of walking in nature. Walking in nature has become impractical for most of us today. Even in city parks we hear traffic, our cell phones, and many other modern distractions. We have lost the connection to earth that the Indians had. We have lost the ability to walk for hours completely alone in the wilderness. In modern suburbs, we have lost the ability to walk to the store or let out children walk to school because there are no longer sidewalks. Walking is something people do to get from their car in the parking lot to their desk at work or from their car to the grocery store. Something I remember from years ago: “We now have plenty of philosophy teachers, but no philosophers.” Perhaps we need to walk more. ( )