In all too many books the reader can sense the seated body, doubled up, stooped, shriveled in on itself.” My seated body shifted guiltily in its chair, which it had occupied all morning. Far more conducive to the act of creation, Gros continues, is “the walking body”—which, he says, is “unfolded and tensed like a bow: opened to wide spaces like a flower to the sun.” Nietzsche, he reminds us, wrote that we should “sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement.” The philosophers were ganging up on me; I closed my laptop and went for a
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