Frédéric Gros
Rarely does any book, let alone one on philosophy, start with such a trenchant opening sentence. Gros, however, is not one to mince his words. In his surprise best seller, Gros explores the whys and wherefores of walking, to construct ‘A Philosophy of Walking’ or ‘Marcher, une philosophie’ in the original French.
Only a French person could turn an act of everyday motion into a philosophy, and one with such depth and breadth. Traditional English philosophers are more concerned with logic and language. The newer French school is interested in the everyday, the ‘quotidian’. Gros regards ideas derived from the re-examination of academic treatises as as dusty as the books from whence they came. Only by enveloping oneself in the everyday, can ideas be vibrant and relevant.
Gros first noticed how many other philosophers had walked; not walked as in go upstairs to their studies or to libraries, but walked in cities and the countryside. Walked in order to think. Rousseau, Nietzsche, and of course most obviously Thoreau, wrestled with their philosophies on long walks. All came up with their concepts and ideas whilst tramping through streets and landscapes.
Gros explores walking by examining notions of a higher order, and presents them as short, eminently readable chapters in his book. Gros locates walking in an envelope of big concepts such as solitude, slowness, freedom, silence, repetition and weariness. Take gravity, an essential element to the act of walking, without which we would bounce, fly, hover, but never walk. Gravity is as essential to walking as a pair of legs. Gros explores the relationship between landscape, body and mind, describes how in walking, sometimes the only noise can be the conversation a walker has between their body and their soul.
In one arresting chapter, he describes how walker and landscape draw ever closer through walking. The mere act of walking, not the purposeful walk to the office or house, but the physical absorption into the landscape that all walkers intuitively understand. He talks about the “sedimentation of the presence of the landscape in your body.” Walking so as not to conquer the earth, but to be of it.
I have a place, not thirty minutes from my house, that I return to time and time again. It requires effort to access, being a stiff climb to a viewpoint overlooking a hidden valley in the garigue. Once there, I find a convenient stone and sit looking over the landscape. Apart from hawks and songbirds, I have never seen any larger animals there, although I know that higher in the mountains live deer, wild boar and possibly even wolves as they migrate across Europe from the east.
I have visited this place of quietness and solitude many, many times. There exists an ancient spell over the valley, rendering it eerily silent. I have sat there and absorbed it, and it has absorbed me.
I have been promised that this is where my ashes will be spread. This is of little comfort to me in death, since I have no belief or interest in an afterlife. But it will comfort me in dying to know that some of the sedimentation of the landscape that is now in me will be returned, so that I am no longer a thief of the landscape, but a partner involved in an equal caress.
Maybe returning my absorbed sediment to the land will also break its spell of silence.
