Breakfast with Socrates by Robert Rowland Smith

Author:Robert Rowland Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

BREAKFAST WITH SOCRATES

son for going to the gym in the first place. What you see at the gym is bodies attempting to resist the fact that they are bodies, that is, natural entities bound one day to give up the ghost. That you do have a body means that when you’re on the treadmill, you are running for your life.

Fortunately there’s something about running that brings the liveness that you do have especially alive and seems to put death behind you. London has a store selling athletic shoes called Run and Become, a name that gets to the heart of the energetic connection between running and existence. Of course you can stand there and just be, you can lie on a couch munching doughnuts and just be, but for your being to become itself, to burst into a flame of beingness, there’s nothing quite like running. That’s partly because running feels primal, even feral—as we run we become an animal in the human race—it asks you to summon your aliveness and make everything kinetic, transfuse all white into red, as if there were no greater effort. In this, running expresses one of life’s essential properties, which is the capacity to run by itself: to pick itself up by its own bootstraps, to displace itself without external force acting upon it. Being has this godlike power to mobilize itself, to motor itself, to be auto-motive. Your body is an automobile that, unlike the duplicitous car, needs no ignition to get it going.

Compared to that Volkswagen you drove to the gym, then, you are a superior entity. That is the good news. The bad news is that this body that moves by itself may not be so uniquely yours, after all. A moment ago I was describing the immutable, isotopic relationship between your body and you, the complete identity of the two. But go into any weight room in any gym and you will see its occupants

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