OK, I think I have it: this next book project isn’t precisely a “book about walking,” anymore than it’s a general history of long-range reconnaissance doctrine or a quasi-panpsychist account of sentience and environmental discernment. It’s an approach to *a general theory of the probe*. Lordy.
0 Boosts
0 Likes
I feel like I mean this as a gift for The Kids? A gentle encouragement & reminder that life has never discovered anything without extending some part of itself out beyond the threshold of safety?
I want to expand on this. The way I see it, multiple, independent but interlocking circumstances – from parenting styles, ubiquitous mediation and the emergence of a politics aimed at the protection of feelings to, especially, the reality of developmental years lost to lockdown – have saddled a generation with anxiety and a disinclination to take risks.
But nothing in the history of life on this planet suggests anything but that knowledge, capacity and risk are intimately bound up with one another. And the specific place that these things meet takes the form of *the probe*: a limited, careful excursion beyond the perimeter of safety, intended to return knowledge from the broader environment beyond.
This book is about how we can restore our own capacity for conscious probes of the unknown, even when peril is near and the calculus of risk weighs heavily on one’s choices. It is about becoming the kind of people who probe whatever space is available to them, and return more capable.
@adamgreenfield That actually sounds useful, which I think is the best yardstick for any project.
@adamgreenfield I dipped into the Wikipedia article, "Autobiography of a Super-Tramp" which book seems to Go There. (walking beyond the familiar and the perimeters of safety)
@adamgreenfield All books are written at the end of the world.
Maybe there are books one can only write at the end of the world.