Just under a myriad

A week of writing in Provence

I’m Bryan Kam. I endeavour daily to make philosophy accessible and relevant. To that end I write this newsletter and host a podcast called Clerestory. I’m also writing a book called Neither/Nor and I’m a founding member of Liminal Learning. In London, I host a book club, a writing group, and other events. My work looks at how abstract concepts relate to embodied life, and how to use this understanding to transform experience.

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Last night I returned from the south of France, or more specifically a medieval town called Goult in Vaucluse, Provence, near Avignon and Marseille. Since 2021, I’ve been there every year with Bloom, but this time I was just there to write for a week. It is beautiful, and yet I found myself too absorbed in my writing to do much walking or enjoying the outdoors.

Nietzsche liked to walk and hike and write in the South of France, near Èze, which is closer to another beautiful place I’ve been in other years, Villefranche-sur-Mer. The tourist page on the Nietzsche trail reports that “in 1883, the writer, plunged into a period of self-doubt, found the Côte d'Azur an unexpected source of inspiration.”

But in 1882 he had published this, which suggests that perhaps he had intended to find such inspiration in movement.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science §366 (1882; trans. Josefine Nauckhoff):

Faced with a scholarly book. — We are not among those who have ideas only between books, stimulated by books — our habit is to think outdoors, walking, jumping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or right by the sea where even the paths become thoughtful. Our first question about the value of a book, a person, or a piece of music is: ‘Can they walk?’ Even more, ‘Can they dance?’ We rarely read; but are none the worse on that account — and oh, how quickly we guess how someone has come to his ideas; whether seated before the inkwell, stomach clenched, head bowed over the paper; and oh, how soon we’re done with his book! Cramped intestines betray themselves — you can bet on it — no less than stuffy air, closed ceilings, cramped spaces. — Those were my feelings just now as I closed a decent, scholarly book — grateful, very grateful, but also relieved ... In a scholar’s book there is nearly always something oppressive, oppressed: the ‘specialist’ emerges somehow — his eagerness, his seriousness, his ire, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunchback — every specialist has his hump.

I’ve always wondered how he wrote while hiking in the Alps or traipsing in the Côte d'Azur. Did he use a notebook or paper? How big was it? Did he bring any surface to write on? Where did he sit? Or did he somehow write standing? What were pens like in the 1880s? With whom was he dancing?

Others have written books on this; there’s A Philosophy of Walking by Gros and Howe, and Hiking with Nietzsche by John Kaag. But I’m weak on secondary sources — perhaps an unfair resistance to scholarly books.¹ Still, I find myself curious how he managed it. And I’m going more into biography, so I may need to face some scholarly books in the near future.

Here’s Nietzsche again, six years later in Ecce Homo (1888; trans. Judith Norman):

Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not conceived while moving around outside, — with your muscles in a celebratory mode as well. All prejudices come from the intestines. — Sitting down — I have said it before — is a true sin against the Holy Spirit. —

The view from where I was writing. I have to admit that most of my writing was done indoors and sitting down.

I wish I could report traipsing and hiking and dancing, but instead I mostly typed at my replacement laptop, at a desk.

As I flew back from France, I read a beautiful Karl Ove Knausgaard piece on alienation and computing: “The Reenchanted World” (June 2025). First, it’s very Neither/Nor:

It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world; it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and the experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions—the unrepeatable and the unpredictable—are what technology abolishes.

The feeling is one of loss of the world.

But also, he reports a similarly disembodied relationship between writing and nature:

I could, of course, turn my back on it all and move out to the countryside, into the woods, up into the mountains, or out to the sea, and live a healthy life as a machineless Luddite, close to nature. I had sometimes left everything, lived on distant, small islands out at sea, in cabins in the woods and in the mountains, not to get closer to nature, admittedly, but to write, and for no more than a few months at a time. These months were marked by a lack, a constant desire for something that wasn’t there, something that what was there couldn’t fulfill, neither the sea nor the woods nor the mountains. We are connected to one another, we who live now, we who, if fate would have it, pass one another on the street one day or not, we who sit next to one another at a bus station one evening or not. We have lived through the same times, heard the same stories, seen the same news, thought along the same lines, had the same experiences. We are woven into one another’s lives, and in that weave—which is invisible, a bit like how the force field between particles is invisible—is where meaning is created, also the meaning of nature. It sat in my head. It sat in me.

That’s a pretty good description of my relationship to the Provençal beauty which was around me.

Nevertheless, I got quite a bit of writing done. My goal was to write 1,000 words per day on the book, Neither/Nor. This is “zero draft” material, rougher even than a first draft, but hopefully weaving together the parts that will need to go into the final product.

Here’s how I did:

• Day 1: 1,013 words

• Day 2: 1,024 words

• Day 3: 1,043 words

• Day 4: 1,305 words

• Day 5: 1,944 words

• Day 6: 1,388 words

• Day 7: 1,002 words

• Day 8: 1,050 words (back in London).

For a total of 9,769 words so far. Almost a myriad.

My brain is too raw to summarize what I’ve written, so I’ll refer you instead to last week’s post, which I’ve edited since last week to engage with some reader feedback.

Thanks to Isabela Granic for hosting the writing week, to Marc Santolini for reading and providing feedback on our preprint, to Julia Willemyns for sending me the wonderful Knausgaard article, to Leigh Biddlecome for a supportive chat, and to Joe Hodson for a critique of Nietzschean gratitude.

If you read this post, please like it to let me know! And I’d love for you to subcribe, or support my work on Patreon or Ko-Fi. My trip to Provence was made possible by such support, so thank you to all who have supported my writing on these platforms.

All best,

Bryan

1. I don’t know enough about either book to assume they are “scholarly” in Nietzsche’s dry sense, but I think I resist secondary sources as being “further away from the experience that incited the primary writing.” They could, of course, be closer to the experience of life which results of reading the primary writing — and to other experiences of life.