This book by Fréderic Gros is, as the title suggests, a philosophical stroll through the nature and psycho-biosocial mechanics of, and historically-significant figures associated with that simplest human means of locomotion. Or should I say perambulation? Probably. It deals in utter magnificently eloquent terms with the silences, solitudes, slownesses and strangely metaphysically inspiring spaces found when one walks: Nietzsche, Nerval, Rousseau, Kant, Rimbaud, Thoreau and Gandhi get their own chapters examining the purposes and uses of the "art" of pedestrian travel; I'm fairly sure the book was written as such that this shines through the text but it may be a facet of just my own over-egged poetic reading, that the book works even more fantastically than it presumably still does otherwise should one take the whole notional field of "walking" as the metaphor for the dogged, day-by-day, step-by-step human travel through their own life - I certainly found it yielded many insights personally that were not necessarily there in the text itself with a grasp of such in the halfway-back of my mind. I loved this book and you can very probably expect to see a second post on here about it in the years to come, on the inevitable re-read.
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