Running is Life: Transcending the Crisis of Modernity

By Bruce Fleming

Running feels good. It also centers the runner in the world, solves the problems implied by the Cartesian split between body and soul, and establishes an active relationship between the self and others. Running takes the motion we are all born with (that is the essence of life) and with the individual providing the impetus, projects us into the world of others. When we run, we transcend ourselves and place ourselves in the world. Running is Life is set in many places—Cairo, the Eastern Sierras, Las Vegas, New York's Adirondack Mountains, and Barcelona, among others—but always in the moving body of the runner hurtling both through and into the world. Running is Life is both a hymn to human motion and an explanation of its sweetness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Jun 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9780761851769

Bruce Fleming

A native of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Bruce Fleming graduated from Haverford College at nineteen with a degree in philosophy (BA ’74), and holds graduate degrees in comparative literature from the University of Chicago (MA ’78) and Vanderbilt University (PhD ’82). He was a Fulbright Scholar in West Berlin and taught for two years each at the University of Freiburg in Germany and the National University of Rwanda, the latter as a Fulbright professor. He has taught at the US Naval Academy since 1987 and is the author of over twenty books. His nonfiction titles discuss a variety of subjects ranging from military-civilian relations to the liberal-conservative clash in politics and from literary modernism to dance criticism, and his fiction work includes a novel and short fiction. His personal essays have been published in many leading US literary magazines, including The Yale Review, The Antioch Review, The Gettysburg Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Southwest Review. He has won an O. Henry Award and the Antioch Review’s Award for Distinguished Prose, as well as the US Naval Academy’s Award for Excellence in Research and a US Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Award. Fleming has published op-eds in national media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Atlantic, and The Federalist and been interviewed on CNN, C-SPAN, NPR, and the BBC. He lives with his family outside Annapolis, Maryland.

Book preview