Flaneur's Alley

In the opening pages of his book If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler Italo Calvino drops a really interesting (and possible) categorization of books. I am still digesting how I would fit certain books…

What I do is in no sense done for your enjoyment or benefit, as you seem to think. Finally, if I by chance exterminated your species, I should not know it.

Strolling is the gastronomy of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live.

And that is, I believe, a part of defiance against death. I don’t want to know which from those books will remain unread. That will remain uncertain until the very last moment.

I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything, smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark.

Friedrich Nietzsche dedicated his book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (1873) to an extremely important part in the history of philosophy: philosophy before Socrates. In a chapter dedicated to Thales, he offers a…

I just started browsing the diaries (or the Sketchbook 1966-1971) by Swiss writer and architect Max Frisch. And the opening chapter is called “Questionnaire”. As in his diary Frisch was preoccupied by the questions of…

Where all the other people like Joyce and Lewis got stuck in the morass and dirt of modern life, Miller conies out on the other side with a grin, whole, hard and undamaged.

My ideal is to be free of ideals, free of principles, free of isms and ideologies. I want to take to the ocean of life like a fish takes to the sea.