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Max beerbohm going out for a walk thesis proposal

Max beerbohm going out for a walk thesis proposal Both of them

Max Beerbohm’s essay “Going Out for a Walk” sounds very much like the famous essay “On Going a Journey” by William Hazlitt (1778-1830). Like Beerbohm, Hazlitt enjoyed reading, writing and thinking. Beerbohm’s chief complaint against being taken out for a walk is that walking tends to make the brain shut down.

My objection to it is that it stops the brain.

He can’t think of anything to say to the man who has dragged him out for a destination-less walk, and the other man has nothing to say to him but the most banal things. This seems to be why William Hazlitt, who enjoyed walking, begins his essay with one major qualification:

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself.. I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time.

Beerbohm seems to be saying that he occasionally enjoys going for a walk if it is his own idea and he doesn’t have to put up with, or keep up with, a companion. Beerbohm doesn’t believe in walking for the sake of walking. He wants to have a purpose, a destination. That probably says a lot about his character. He differs from Hazlitt in that respect–but Hazlitt lived much earlier when there was less to do. Beerbohm lived well into the age of motor-cars. In “Going Out for a Walk” he writes:

Even if you go to some definite place, for some definite purpose, the brain would rather you took a vehicle;

William Hazlitt was a good friend of William Wordsworth, the great poet who was noted for composing his verses while he was walking “o’er vales and hills.” But Wordsworth would not walk with Hazlitt, or vice versa.

Max beerbohm going out for a walk thesis proposal well into

Both of them would have found that their brains had shut off, and literature would be missing some fine pieces.

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“Going Out For a Walk” by Max Beerbohm is a short humorous essay, in which Beerbohm casts himself as a typical urbanite, aesthete, and intellectual, who is dubious about the virtues of outdoor exercise.

He portrays himself as never “going out for a walk” voluntarily, of his own volition, but instead as having acquaintances he meets while visiting the country “take him out on walks”, i.e. compel him to walk with them by offering invitations it would be rude to refuse. In the middle of the essay, he describes walking as an activity inimical to thought and good conversation, arguing that the brain shuts off during a walk.

In a humorous twist though, he ends the essay by mentioning that the inspiration for the essay, and much of its structure, were worked out by him as he was out walking.

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