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Quote by Frédéric Gros

“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…”

Quote by Frédéric Gros

Book:A Philosophy of Walking
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A Philosophy of Walking

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Frédéric Gros

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“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. There’s the silence of woodland. Clumps and groves of trees form shifting, uncertain walls around us. We walk along existing paths, narrow winding strips of beaten earth. We quickly lose our sense of direction. That silence is tremulous, uneasy. Then there’s the silence of tough summer afternoon walks across the flank of a mountain, stony paths, exposed to an uncompromising sun.”

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“This time, there’s no question of freeing yourself from artifice to taste simple joys. Instead there is the promise of meeting a freedom head-on as an outer limit of the self and of the human, an internal overflowing of a rebellious Nature that goes beyond you. Walking can provoke these excesses: surfeits of fatigue that make the mind wander, abundances of beauty that turn the soul over, excesses of drunkenness on the peaks, the high passes (where the body explodes). Walking ends by awakening this rebellious, archaic part of us: our appetites become rough and uncompromising, our impulses inspired. Because walking puts us on the vertical axis of life: swept along by the torrent that rushes just beneath us. 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. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it’s all very well for psychologists’ consulting rooms. But isn’t being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake – for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait – a stupid and burdensome fiction? 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.”

ArtPhilosophyEarthJoyPoetryPeaceNatureFreedomWalksWonderBeautyMovementAdventureWalkingDiscoveryAweHikingSerenityOur PlanetPilgrimExplorePilgrimageFresh AirOutsideOutdoorsVisual PoetryGet OutsideHikesOutdoors Church
Book:A Philosophy of Walking
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“You lift your head, you’re on your way, but really just to be walking, to be out of doors. That’s it, that’s all, and you’re there. Outdoors is our element: the exact sensation of living there.”

ArtPhilosophyEarthJoyPoetryPeaceNatureFreedomWalksWonderBeautyMovementAdventureWalkingDiscoveryAweHikingSerenityOur PlanetPilgrimExplorePilgrimageFresh AirOutsideOutdoorsVisual PoetryGet OutsideHikesOutdoors Church
Book:A Philosophy of Walking
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