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Quote by Frédéric Gros

“An author who composes while walking, on the other hand, is free from such bonds; his thought is not the slave of other volumes, not swollen with verifications, nor weighted with the thought of others. It contains no explanation owed to anyone: just thought, judgement, decision. It is thought born of a movement, an impulse. In it we can feel the body’s elasticity, the rhythm of a dance. It retains and expresses the energy, the springiness of the body. Here is thought about the thing itself, without the scrambling, the fogginess, the barriers, the customs clearances of culture and tradition. The result will not be long and meticulous exegesis, but thoughts that are light and profound. That is really the challenge: the lighter a thought, the more it rises, and becomes profound by rising – vertiginously – above the thick marshes of conviction, opinion, established thought. While books conceived in the library are on the contrary superficial and heavy. They remain on the level of recopying.”

Quote by Frédéric Gros

Work

A Philosophy of Walking

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Frédéric Gros

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“When one has walked a long way to reach the turning in the path that discloses an anticipated view, and that view appears, there is always a vibration of the landscape. It is repeated in the walker’s body. The harmony of the two presences, like two strings in tune, each feeding off the vibration of the other, is like an endless relaunch. Eternal Recurrence is the unfolding in a continuous circle of the repetition of those two affirmations, the circular transformation of the vibration of the presences. The walker’s immobility facing that of the landscape … it is the very intensity of that co-presence that gives birth to an indefinite circularity of exchanges: I have always been here, tomorrow, contemplating this landscape.”

“La nuit, il n’y avait presque aucun signe du Grand Désert d’Harmat qui l’environnait, car tout était très noir. Aux limites de sa perception il ressentait une absence, dans l’espace qui happait les mouvements pour les renvoyer, indécis : l’Obscurité ! Elle était là, dans le Grand Désert d’Harmat, patiente et vigilante ; le jeune Sorcelier, par anticipation, frissonna. Seuls témoins tangibles, les plis de ses vêtements où le sable s’était infiltré, comme partout sur sa personne, dans sa bouche, son nez, au coin des yeux, sur ses oreilles, sa peau... Par ces particules granulaires, ces simples grains à la rondeur naturelle, infimes et innombrables, il retrouva son affirmation au Grand Désert et repoussa plus loin la menace de l’Obscur. Vaincu par une saine fatigue et noyé de sérénité, Célian alla se coucher sous l’œil bienveillant de son mentor.”

“When walking in this mode we discover the immense vigour of starry night skies, elemental energies, and our appetites follow: they are enormous, and our bodies are satisfied. When you have slammed the world’s door, there is nothing left to hold you: pavements no longer guide your steps (the path, a hundred thousand times repeated, of the return to the fold). Crossroads shimmer like hesitant stars, you rediscover the tremulous fear of choosing, a vertiginous freedom.”

“A truly brave man is ever serene; he is never taken by surprise; nothing ruffles the equanimity of his spirit. In the heat of battle he remains cool; in the midst of catastrophes he keeps level his mind. Earthquakes do not shake him, he laughs at storms. We admire him as truly great, who, in the menacing presence of danger or death, retains his self-possession; who, for instance, can compose a poem under impending peril or hum a strain in the face of death. Such indulgence betraying no tremor in the writing or in the voice, is taken as an infallible index of a large nature—of what we call a capacious mind (Yoyū), which, far from being pressed or crowded, has always room for something more.”