Frédéric Gros

Explores the role and influence of walking in the lives of such thinkers as Kant, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gandhi, and Jack Kerouac.

A Philosophy of Walking

Will Dawson

The lesson was that in walking, the authentic sign of assurance is a good slowness. What I mean is a sort of slowness that isn't exactly the opposite of speed.

Marion

When you are that age, when you can't say that you have loved, because love is still a future flowering that you yearn for with your entire being, there is lightness in your step, eagerness for the great love at the end of the road.

Maria Buitrago

But haste and speed accclerate time, which passes more quickly, and two hours of hurry shorten a day. Every minute is torn apart by being segmented, stuffed to bursting. You can pile a mountain of things into an hour. Days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer, because you have allowed every hour, every minute, every second to breathe, to deepen, instead of filling them up by straining the joints. Hurrying means doing several things at once, and quickly: this; then that; and then something else. When you hurry, time is filled to bursting, like a badly-arranged drawer in which you have stuffed different things without any attempt at order.

Deyana

An absolutely lovely read. During quarantine, one of the only things that kept me tethered to my sanity was what I, among millions, half-jokingly/half-seriously called my "daily government allotted walk." Except, it wouldn't really be daily, but it would be whenever I had the energy to drop off a letter in one of those blue collection boxes. 

Somewhat surprisingly, but pleasantly so, this work also weaves threads of capitalism critiques, and though it is of a philosophical nature (hence the title), it doesn't feel stuffy but rather like reading an organized stream of consciousness. I almost feel sorry for my copy of this book due to the number of times I underlined a phrase or dog-eared a page.

P.S. I would give this book 5 stars, but I found myself enjoying the first half more significantly than the second half.

A Philosophy of Walking

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