Aggressively French.

BUYER BEWARE: this is NOT "a philosophy of walking," as claimed in the title, but instead is primarily "a philosophy of taking a multiday/weeks-long hike through the french countryside as a white man."

i borrowed this from the library because it was included in verso's instagram post about "books for people who take silly little walks" (https://www.instagram.com/p/C8fD955srOh). my fiance grace and i take short walks usually twice a day--we have a well-travelled route that goes from our apartment, through a short loop in a nearby urban park, and back home via quiet tree-lined streets. 

i assumed that frédéric gros would focus primarily on this kind of walk, but instead he spends most of the book expounding upon the transcendence (while quoting from american transcendentalists) of walking all day for multiple days through idyllic landscapes of mountains and forests and streams. there's a sort of naivete that gros falls into when describing this kind of walk, which he writes is a way to go "against the system, a matter of refusing to play." but this ability to unplug from the matrix and escape the rat race, maaan, is only possible if you have enough disposable income and free time to do so. and while he writes about the physicality of the body while walking, he's curiously silent about the way our walking bodies are racialized and gendered--hiking solo as a woman/femme, for example, is a very different experience from hiking as a man. 

there's another big absence in this book: cars! maybe this is my perspective as an american who grew up in suburbia, but i feel like the defining feature of walking in the 21st century is the constant threat of being killed by a car, especially in places that are more suburban/rural. a chapter on the dangers pedestrians face would've been interesting.

my fave chapters were the profiles of various walker/writer/philosophers, although they're almost entirely white men from the 19th century. the book really picks up with its profile of ghandi and how his most effective political actions, like his famous 1930 salt march, centered on walking. it's after this profile that gros finally considers other types of walking--including what he terms "strolling," which is to say the short walks we take around our neighborhoods that most people do, and that grace and i do twice a day. his line about how repeated strolls through a place allows you to "peel away the layers of the street" by noticing "the color of those shutters, the slash of colour they make on the walls ... the construction of windows, bright orange reflecting the sunset against mottled grey facades," put to language a truth i already knew and felt--which is what the best philosophy can do.

anyway. if you like to take "silly little walks," i think this is worth reading just for the nuggets of wisdom that're scattered throughout, but BEWARE that the book mostly isn't about the sort of walking you and i do in our daily lives.

Not what I was expecting, not enjoyable and dare I say nothing that revolutionary and quite boring oops

Yürümedeki kaçınılmazlık, bir kez yola çıkanın gideceği yere ulaşma zorunluluğudur…
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Oldum olası yürümeyi seven bir insan olmuşumdur. Özellikle de geçen sene stresle başa çıkmada bana en çok yardımı dokunan her gün 2 saatlik yürüyüşlere çıkmak olmuştu. Yürümenin Felsefesi benim gibi yürümeyle derin bir bağ kuran herkes için müthiş bir okuma. Frederic Gros’un hem kendi düşünceleri hem de ünlü düşünürlerin yürümeyle olan ilişkisini aktarıyor. Çoğunlukla da bambaşka zamanlarda yaşamış bu kadar kişiyle aynı eylemi yerine getirmeyi adeta görev haline getirmemiz beni etkiledi. Sadece kaçış olarak değil aynı zamanda bir arayış ve bir dönüş olarak yürüme insanlık tarihi kadar eski. Doğayla bütün olma, kafadaki düşünceleri toparlama için de oldukça önemli. Bazen Gandhi gibi bir başkaldırı bazen Kant gibi dakiklik ve bazen de Nietzche gibi herkesten uzaklaşma isteği içinde yollara düşme olarak bir yürüme anlatılıyor. Benim severek okuduğum ve sürekli olarak altını çizdiğim bir kitap oldu. Bu kadar seveceğimi bilsem yıllarca bekletmezdim. 

Book club

I hate this book