Cycling
Transforming the world on two wheels.
We feel so close to the intellectual, publicist and TV journalist Roger Willemsen, who died far too early, his thinking and his ability to put complex connections into print-ready sentences that we consider him a regular guest at the Blue Goose, even though he knowingly never checked in with us.
If this were the case, we would be talking down the aisle about one of his favorite topics, the art of travel. “I cannot become fundamentally different, I can only travel through my subjunctive.” He would say sentences like this to you at some point while he was getting one of our folding bikes ready to go. “What, who, how would I be when I’m where?” he would ask. “Do you have a specific approach to encountering yourself in the possibility form?” you asked back as he leaned on the saddle of the bike to answer: “The most important thing would be to let yourself go with the flow. Like the stroller who wanders through big cities and doesn’t want to connect the sights with each other.”
“Does that mean the central element of your travel culture is lack of intentionality?” He would nod. “I let myself drift. And wherever there is tension, that’s where I go!” Or if I go there, you might think that you say: “experience” and mean being on the move as a human being, getting ahead and at the same time appropriating the world, which is best achieved on a bicycle.
Willemsen pushed his bike towards the exit and had another thought: “The possibility of completely disappearing yourself, of being inconspicuous, of losing yourself, is a condition for winning yourself. And in another sense, actually, yes, owning yourself. In order to be able to say ‘I’.”
We would agree: This is most noticeable in places where we don’t expect it and which we wouldn’t have found if we had gone looking for them. It is probably the case that the stories, situations and events in a place appeal to us because they have something to do with us.
“Yes, exactly. I take places personally. I always find that I’ve only really been there if I can distinguish the place from all the others I’ve seen.” “And now bye!” our favorite guest would have said between the door and the bike off without a destination.
Impressions
