Whenever I say I’m going camping, people always respond in the same way. “Not glamping?” they’ll say, with a smirk.
No. Not glamping. Glamping is shit. Glamping is the inexplicable practice of putting a four-poster bed in a yurt. Nobody wants this. The people who like the bed would rather it was somewhere else (like a room) and the people who like the yurt are idiots. I stayed in one once as a freebie at a festival. By 5am, the inside was somehow brighter than the outside world, as if the entire thing was functioning as a lens, focused directly on my hangover. Never again.
My camping dream — my Platonic form of camping, given this is a philosophy column — is the precise opposite. A small tent, a wilderness, a sleeping bag and a means of making fire. I feel the call of it often, like nostalgia, or a thirst.
Surprisingly, many philosophers — despite being the sort of people you might consider able to starve to death in a supermarket — feel the same. Nietzsche, for example, was never happier than when hiking in the Alps. In Denmark today you will find whole trails named after Soren Kierkegaard. “I have walked myself into my best thoughts,” he wrote, “and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” Even Socrates, who spends the beginning of Plato’s Phaedrus being rather pissy about the way he is being forced to go on a walk (partly because “the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country” but also because he has no sandals), winds up conceding that gosh, yes, the countryside is rather pleasant.
