George Wilson, The Man Who Walked His Life Away
deadspin.com
George Wilson, The Man Who Walked His Life Away
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: George Wilson, The Man Who Walked His Life Away
#2The fellow should be canonized. Walking is truly God's gift.
Re: George Wilson, The Man Who Walked His Life Away
#3This puts the challenge in Verne's Around the World in 80 Days into context. The story mimicked and exaggerated contemporary popular entertainment.
Re: George Wilson, The Man Who Walked His Life Away
#4That was an interesting read, but man oh man what a harsh life, and, what a dreadful family. Can you even imagine going through even a tiny bit of that without breaking?
Re: George Wilson, The Man Who Walked His Life Away
#5The culture of the past feels so unrelatably foreign that it really feels like a fictional world.
Can you imagine hearing that some dude is walking really far and going to see an improvised carnival with an entourage of “bodyguards” with whips keeping people away from some guy walking thousands of laps around a track?
Re: George Wilson, The Man Who Walked His Life Away
#6You see people like this sometimes. I met a guy who practically lives on his bike. Like the guy in the article, he's sort of an outcast. Yet when he's not riding, he's walking around with his helmet on his head. It's like he's a tool that can only do one job, but is fantastic at it. I wonder how many luminaries throughout history have been similarly specialized. It seems like a type of beneficial obsession.
Re: George Wilson, The Man Who Walked His Life Away
#7The culture of the past feels so unrelatably foreign that it really feels like a fictional world. Can you imagine hearing that some dude is walking really far and going to see an improvised carnival with an entourage of “bodyguards” with whips keeping people away from some guy walking thousands of laps around a track?
> The culture of the past feels so unrelatably foreign that it really feels like a fictional world.
One idea for teaching history is to emphasize that which you, as a time traveler, would find startlingly strange ("wait, WAT?!?").
A 1700's British officer, traveling with American militia, is utterly boggled... the American officer, he is talking with his men, asking them what they think!?! A WWII American officer, with not-unfamiliar clothes, familiar language, many familiar ideas, and culture... and then he shares his commonplace views on negroes. A familiar city in the 1950's, with familiar still-there office buildings, in the summer... without any AC (so people sit by open windows to catch a breeze). Making arrangements to meet at highly specific locations and times (at noon under the clock at Grand Central)... because without cell phones, mobile incremental rendezvous is hard. The Sun goes down, so you stop working, because you can't see in the dark - it's been suggested that the greatest US technological triumph of the entire 20th Century was... rural electrification. Small-village farmers in Egypt, part of the Ottoman empire, using strikes and slowdowns to discipline local elites, who fear the attention of "what's wrong here and how do I fix it" imperial officials. Sales guy, eventually to head IBM, is said to have gone into stores with competitors' cash registers... and smashed them with a baseball bat. Fights and drawn knives on the floor of the US Senate. The opulence of Versailles... human excrement is cleaned off hallway floors not once, but twice a day! And so on, and on...
Re: George Wilson, The Man Who Walked His Life Away
#8That was an interesting read, but man oh man what a harsh life, and, what a dreadful family. Can you even imagine going through even a tiny bit of that without breaking?
It's no wonder he had to walk it off everyday... it was probably his only stress relief.
Re: George Wilson, The Man Who Walked His Life Away
#9I suppose this is a nitpick, but what kind of timekeeping was available for this?
> He kept walking, one step at a time, and hit 50 miles with four minutes and 43 seconds to spare.
My understanding of the time is that pocket watches very rarely had second hands, or maybe not even minute hands. And certainly wouldn't be expected to maintain such accuracy over a period of ten hours. What else would be available in a prison yard?
Re: George Wilson, The Man Who Walked His Life Away
#10> He would need to escape from poverty and free himself and his children from strangling debt.
It seems like so many of the things we take for granted today couldn't be taken for granted to the same degree in the past.
Things like being able to declare bankruptcy and erase all your debts, the general liberty/protection provided by the state from having our freedom/autonomy being violated by others, etc.