La vida fuera de uno mismo

Like an experience capable of sweeping away our routine, like a forgotten fracture, adventure can ignite our silenced desires. In an addictive melee with some fundamental texts of Western culture and the most original readings of contemporary times, Pietro Del Soldà puts our daily problems in dialogue with the Histories of Herodotus, the intuitions of the sociologist Georg Simmel with the Odyssey of Kazantzakis, Sartre's theater with the most autobiographical Plato and the ironic wisdom of Montaigne. In a fascinating travelogue through centuries and continents, the author shows us how the Greeks defended their ideals of freedom on the battlefield of Marathon; In South America, we follow in the footsteps of Alexander von Humboldt, precursor of an idea of nature that we cannot help but make our own; In Prague, we attended the premiere of Mozart's Don Giovanni, which, with its air of freedom and rebellion, seduced and scandalized the public; and in the North African desert we walk in the footsteps of the writer and adventurer Isabelle Eberhardt. The adventure that these stories tell us about is the main antidote against conformism and the tyranny of the Self. As this exciting essay warns us, adventure appears "in the here and now, it worries us and attracts us. We cannot prepare ourselves to live it, there is no possible introduction to it because it is a radical opening to the unpredictability of the moment that cannot be planned".