·
Walking allows us time to play with ideas,
explore concepts, and be wrong in our thinking without worrying about others
seeing the rawness of our thoughts.
·
In the book, Gros explores people and lives that
were shaped by walking.
·
Walking
is not a sport. Putting one foot in front of the other is child’s play.
·
Freedom throwing
off the burden of cares, forgetting business for a time
·
Only walking manages to free us from our
illusions about the world.
·
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
·
Speed ;
many people think that walking fast is key, we’re driven to get from point A to
point B and we need to get there as quickly as possible, this is not leisure,
not is it restful.
·
Solitude being
in company forces one to jostle, hamper, walk at wrong speed for others.
·
It’s best
to walk alone
·
Titles
unpack philosophical aspects of walking
·
Walking is understood as a means of personal
freedom that leads to a joy, happiness, or serenity.
·
He further explores how their walking habits have
changed character over time, according to important life events and other
historical or biographical circumstances.
·
His poetic and clear writing imparts a feeling that
even if a light breeze will disturb the pages that make up the cobbled path of
the cover, the walking itself cannot be imperiled.
QUESTIONS
1. Gros says that walking is not a what?
2. Is it best to walk alone or with a group?
3. Name one of the topics Gros discusses in
his book
4. Walking manages to free us from our what?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Do you believe that people’s lives can be
shaped by walking?
2. Why do you think many philosophers are so
interested with walking?
3. What places do you enjoy walking to?
Curiously enough, there was a time when walking was THE major spectator sport in America, as David Remnick reported-
ReplyDeleteMatthew Algeo’s “Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk Was America’s Favorite Spectator Sport” (Chicago Review) is one of those books which open up a forgotten world so fully that at first the reader wonders, just a little, if his leg is being pulled. How could there be an account this elaborate—illustrated with sober handbills, blaring headlines, starchy portrait photographs, and racy newspaper cartoons—of an enthusiasm this unknown? But it all happened. For several decades in the later nineteenth century, the favorite spectator sport in America was watching people walk in circles inside big buildings.
The story Algeo tells begins in 1860, at the start of the Civil War, when a New Englander named Edward Payson Weston made a facetious bet with a friend that, if Lincoln won the Presidential election, he would walk all the way from the State House in Boston to the unfinished Capitol, in Washington, in ten days. Lincoln won, and, ten days before the inaugural, Weston set off. Though he didn’t get there quite in time, his progress, chronicled by the newspapers, enthralled a nation in need of some small fun, and he became an improbable American hero, a kind of Lindbergh of the corns and calluses. Liking his new celebrity, and the money it brought, Weston decided to keep a good thing going and, when the war ended, began to engage in competitive, six-day (never on Sunday) walking marathons in Chicago, New York, and, eventually, London.
For the next two decades, while baseball burbled around the amateur edges and boxing went on in the shadows, walking really was the dominant spectator sport in America, and Weston its central figure...
(continues: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/01/heavens-gaits)
Melany, thanks for this presentation. It's nice to hear you continue with your exploration of walking, although you're already a believer in the power of walking! Gros has some interesting points. He can be a bit romantic thought: walking "frees us from the illusions of the world?" I'm not totally buying that. But, as I said in class, my time as a police officer did illustrate just how effective walking can be as a means of encountering people, places, and things that otherwise would ignore or not observe. Walking can get us out of our shell, especially the shell of our vehicles! Here, Gros' advice that walking is best done without urgency or some rigid sense of destination. This reminds me of some of the walks with my children, especially my daughter, who just wanted to use walking as a chance to explore without worrying over where we going and how long it takes. Maybe this could be an exception to the "walking alone" rule! The discussion around why walking (as Gros and similar writers describe it) seems to be more of a Western tradition really got me thinking. I wonder what you might find if, assuming you find this interesting, you investigate that question a little. Great work, Melany, and keep walking!
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