The Socrates Express
- Автор: Вейнер Эрик
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
- Жанр: География, путевые заметки
Электронная книга - «The Socrates Express». Краткое содержание книги:
We contemplate for the same reasons we travel: to see the world from a different perspective, to unearth hidden beauty and find new ways of being. We want to learn how to embrace wonder. Face regrets. Sustain hope.
Eric Weiner, *New York Times* bestselling author of *The Geography of Bliss* , combines his twin passions for philosophy and global travel in a pilgrimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from philosophers around the world, from Marcus Aurelius to Arthur Schopenhauer, Confucius to Montaigne. Traveling by train (the most thoughtful mode of transport) he traversed thousands of miles, making stops in Athens, Delhi,...
To my surprise, it is the philosopher-emperor Marcus who answers. Respond to adversity, real or imagined, not with self-pity or hand-wringing, but simply by starting over. Viewed this way, life no longer feels like a narrative gone awry, or a botched ending. None of that is real. There are no endings. Only an infinite chain of beginnings.
So I begin. One foot in front of the other. Good. Now again.
I follow the trail, stopping occasionally to gaze at the lake or the wispy clouds. Eventually I find the small room where Rousseau lived. It’s a simple space, with a canopied bed, a Spartan sitting area, and, in one corner, a wooden trapdoor Rousseau used to make his getaway when fans, or enemies, tracked him down.
His herbarium is here, too: dried and pressed plants, long delicate stalks, frozen in time. A small plaque mentions Rousseau’s “contradictory personality,” an understatement if ever there were one.
Something is noticeably absent: books. So hurried was Rousseau’s escape from Môtiers he didn’t have time to pack his considerable library. In Reveries, he calls this dearth of reading material “one of my greatest joys.” This observation seems awfully peculiar for a man who spent a lifetime reading and writing books. At another point, Rousseau describes walking to a secluded spot by the edge of the lake and listening to the ebb and flow of the water, “lapping against my ears and my eyes… and it was enough to make me pleasantly aware of my existence without troubling myself with thought.” Okay, first he stopped reading; now he has stopped thinking. Was he devolving—or was he onto something?
Rousseau, like Socrates, was a kind of antiphilosopher. He had no patience for “empty logic-chopping” or “hair splitting metaphysical subtleties.” He was a thinker but not an overthinker. Rousseau knew that his favorite organ, the heart, possessed its own intelligence, one we access not with furrowed brow and tight jaw but with loose legs and swinging arms.
People strut and swagger in front of others, but rarely alone. These are social gestures. Walking, the slowest form of travel, is the quickest route to our more authentic selves. We can’t return to some long-lost paradise that probably never was. But we can walk. We can walk to work. We can walk our daughter to school. We can walk, alone, to nowhere in particular on a crisp and breezy autumn afternoon.
We walk to forget. We walk to forget the cranky boss, the spat with the spouse, the pile of unpaid bills, the flashing warning light in your Subaru, indicating either that the tire pressure is low or the car is on fire. We walk to forget, if only momentarily, a world that is “too much with us,” as William Wordsworth, another fine walker, put it.
We walk to forget ourselves, too. I know I do. The surplus fifteen pounds resistant to every diet known to man, the recidivist nasal hair, the decade-old blemish that suddenly, for reasons known only to it, has decided to self-actualize on the crown of my bald head, spreading like an inkblot. All forgotten when I walk.
I recall once watching the summer Olympics on TV and taking a keen interest in competitive walking. Earnest young athletes traipsing toward gold. They looked absurd. Walking is not a sport. The phrase “competitive walking” makes about as much sense as “competitive meditation.” In our Age of the Accessory, walking is one of the few unadorned activities still available to us, one that, as author Rebecca Solnit points out, remains “essentially unimproved since the dawn of time.”
Walking is democratic. Barring a disability, anyone can walk. The wealthy walker has no advantage over the impoverished one. Rousseau, despite his literary success, always saw himself as “the son of a worker,” what we now call blue-collar. People like that didn’t ride in fancy carriages. They walked.
They walked as I do now: attentively, one step at a time, relishing the sturdiness, and the springiness, too, of serious earth.
In late October 1776, Rousseau was navigating a narrow Parisian street, on his way home after a long walk, when, as the biographer Leo Damrosch relays, “a nobleman’s carriage came hurtling toward him, flanked by a huge, galloping Great Dane. He was unable to dodge in time, the dog bowled him over, and he fell hard on the cobblestone street, bleeding profusely and unconscious.” Rousseau likely suffered a concussion and neurological damage. He never recovered fully. Less than two years later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau returned from his morning walk, collapsed, and died.
By all accounts, he died a happy man. Toward the end of his life, his walking had taken on a softer, more sanguine quality. There are still traces of the usual self-pity (“So here I am alone on the earth”) and of the paranoia (“The ceiling above my head has eyes, the walls around me have ears”) but gone is the neediness. He no longer walked to flee or to find or to make a philosophical point. He simply walked.
Rousseau’s legacy is vast. It includes Hallmark cards, Hollywood tearjerkers, heart-shaped emojis, and tell-all memoirs. If you’ve ever said, “I need a good cry,” you can thank Rousseau. If you’ve ever said, “Use your imagination,” you’re being Rousseauvian. If, in the heat of an argument, you’ve actually uttered the words “I don’t care if it makes no sense, it’s how I feel,” Rousseau is your man. If you’ve ever answered heartbreak with a long and angry walk, Rousseau. If your spouse has ever dragged you on a ten-mile trek on a damp, cold day, because “it will be good for you,” you can thank, or curse, Rousseau. Because of him, we think and feel differently, and we think about our feelings differently.
If Descartes was the modern era’s philosopher of the head, Rousseau was its philosopher of the heart. He elevated the passions and made feelings acceptable, not on par with reason, but close. This wasn’t easy. During Rousseau’s time, the Age of Reason, imaginative thinking was suspect. Two centuries later, no less a rationalist than Albert Einstein declared that “imagination is more important than knowledge.”
It’s tempting to dismiss Rousseau as a tree-hugging Luddite who would like to see us all hunting and gathering again and fighting over the good rock, next to the fire. That is not what he had in mind. Rousseau wasn’t advocating a return to the cave but a realignment with nature. A better cave. He foresaw environmental issues decades before the industrial revolution and centuries before California freeways.
Rousseau’s naturalism was never intended as a prescription. It was a thought experiment. What if, Rousseau posited, we peel away the layers of artifice society has applied liberally, like so much rouge, and reveal a more authentic self? Lurking beneath the prim insurance executive lies a rabble-rouser and inside every office worker a mountaineer, itching to break free.
I step out of Rousseau’s old room on the island that is no longer an island and shield my eyes from the sun. I have a choice: rush to catch the water taxi back to town or walk. I decide to walk.
I walk alone. I walk with intention. I let my mind wander, but not too far. I’m getting good at this. No, that is pride speaking. Silence that voice. Connect with the earth. That’s better.
I find a rhythm. I sense my surroundings—the birds singing, the satisfying crunch of gravel underfoot. I walk, and walk some more. My legs ache. My feet grow sore. Yet, still, I walk. It hurts, and it feels good.
I’m making good progress now. How many steps, I wonder? Reflexively, I twist my wrist and am about to check my Fitbit when I stop myself. I inhale deeply, greedily, like a diver coming up for air.
Somewhere along the path, I sense a subtle but definite shift in my… my what? My consciousness? No, it’s my heart. The expectations freeloading in my mind—of “getting” Rousseau, of making progress in my philosophical investigations—melt away. I walk but it doesn’t feel like I am the one doing the walking. I’m all verb, no subject.