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The Boulder: A Philosophy for Bouldering
192 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2013
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118 people want to read
About the author
Francis Sanzaro
10 books5 followersFrancis Sanzaro (Ph.D., Religion), is the author of three books whose genres range from sexuality to technology to athletics, and he is currently hard at work on a thriller. He has appeared on BBC World News, and in their international podcast series, BBC Radio. His essays, poetry and fiction have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Review, The Scotsman, Huffington Post, The Baltimore Post Examiner, Continental Philosophy Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among a dozen others. His books are The Infantile Grotesque: Pathology, Sexuality and a Theory of Religion, (2016); The Boulder: A Philosophy for Bouldering (2013); and Society Elsewhere: Why the Gravest Threat to Humanity Will Come From Within (2018). He is Editor of Rock and Ice and Ascent magazines. More at Fsanzaro.com
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 6, 2020
I love what this book is trying to do, but it takes itself a little too seriously.
At times hilariously pretentious (even though it isn't trying to be funny), at times extremely thoughtful and insightful, this deeper look at the meaning behind bouldering is a fresh take on the sport. I personally loved it, because it was always either super engaging or so terrible it was funny. Either way, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'd recommend it for any serious climber who boulders.
Some of my favorite quotes:
- We cannot boulder without a rock, and the rock cannot boulder without us. lol. Just funny.
- At its best, bouldering is that subtle skill which all athletics attempts to hone in one way or another - the beauty of controlling the body during spectacular feats of strength, courage, impossibility, and fear. It is an idealism we are chasing when we are bouldering at our finest. Bouldering is an act where our failures highlight the will/body split; that tiny gap - however minuscule and essentially undetectable - revealing to us that, first, we are strangers to our own body and, second, the journey to remedy this alienation (athletics) is a profoundly joyous experience. The author talks a lot about how bouldering is joy distilled, and I love that.
- Joy comes before the desire for difficulty, and athletics are cultural expressions of bodily joy.
- In terms of difficulty... We could imagine a dancer simply jumping as high as she could, or rotating as much as possible. That would feel brutish... we expect more... we want difficulty to be so flawless that it turns itself into something else - grace. This highlights the desire to not just send boulders, but to climb them well. It's an art form, not just a way of getting to the top. The boulderer is concerned with form almost as much as success and will not feel that he has truly mastered a problem until he can do it gracefully.
- Not a particular quote, but there was a section on difficulty and why that doesn't define success. We have to look deeper to define success. The author talks about how dance has been written and spoken about so much as an art form, but climbing hasn't - yet they are very similar. Why can't climbing be spoken about in the same way?
- I liked how the author talked about style within bouldering, and how he can tell a southern boulderer from a Yosemite boulderer, not just by how they dress but by how they move. Their home boulders have marked their bodies and their movement. The way some folks patiently position themselves on a terrible sloper and micro-adjust their bodies expresses years (maybe decades) of an awareness of that type of hold or stone, cultivated by repetition. I myself find that as a two-year-old climber who has spent the majority of her time at the New River Gorge where horizontal edges are separated by long, blank surfaces, I tend to feel comfortable climbing very stretched out with tension and getting my feet very high and locking off. The rock you develop on makes its mark.
- Like the Joyce Carol Oates quote about boxing, "One plays football, one doesn't play boxing," Sanzaro states: One does not play bouldering because it is more of an act than a game. Bouldering is a confrontation with will, self, vulnerability, and courage - there is nothing game-like about it.
- From an environmental standpoint, people are absolutely overcrowding and ruining bouldering areas. We develop boulder areas because we benefit from it, not the other way around. The boulders don't need us, we need them, and we should never forget this.
- I personally have always had a very strong, spiritual connection with nature and connect best with the universe and become my best self by being outdoors in solitude. My relationship with rock climbing is similar; it's a very personal one between myself and the rock, and I'm not particularly keen on sharing that with many other people, despite the trend of "spray", bringing groups to crags, and many folks feeling inclined toward having an audience for their climbing or boasting about it and oversharing on social media. I enjoyed the author's similar perspective: there will always be boulderers who climb their best in solitude, and who do this for the very reason that it is not recorded and there are no crowds. / A boulder problem is an intimate affair... movement itself can be very, very personal, almost secretive... sometimes when I move I do not want an audience, as if that cheapens it. Amen.
- About the commercialization of climbing and people doing it for the wrong reasons: Like all sports that go corporate, the logic of capitalism necessarily follows - speed of execution becomes more valued than depth of experience. Difficulty replaces the joy of movement. He goes on to talk about Julia Child disliking the film Julie & Julia (2009) because it turned great recipes, which take time and patience, and should be enjoyed, into a ticklist that requires only "successful" completion. Back to an earlier point... What is success? When we "tick" an area or a climb and move on, appreciation is lost. With the advent of Mountain Project and ticklists, people are climbing for the wrong reasons and missing the point that the experience and the process are the most important, not the send. Stop being a hyper-consumer and enjoy the movement, the process, the climb itself rather than just the tick or the spray.
- I liked his comparison to gymnastics and dance in terms of platform: in dance there is a flat, unchanging stage; in gymnastics, gymnasts push difficulty on an unchanging apparatus. Even a football player might navigate the added variables of changing bodies, but still on an unchanging apparatus. The boulderer must constantly encounter new movement on a changing apparatus and internalize new forms of stone, adapting to the idiosyncratic qualities that various areas provide. Fontainebleau is known for being technical; Hueco requires more finger agility; Yosemite requires hard boulderers to stand on polished nubs or else settle for moderates. The skilled boulderer digs into their repertoire of movement and adjusts to changing rock formations.
- Bouldering's stage is not homogenous like the flatness of a stage; it's heterogenous: the stone is composed of edges and features. As climbers, we have to adapt more than we create. The challenge is not one of creating a work of art (the problem), but of mastering a pre-existing work of art. I love that, and I think it encapsulates the respect and awe for nature that many outdoor climbers have. I cannot explain how thoroughly inspiring and awesomely beautiful I find nature. Rock formations are no exception. It is utterly fascinating how gorgeous and incredible rocks can be, and we are very lucky to climb on such works of art.
- I just thought this was funny: The rock is not a canvas, painted by us. We are the canvas, painted by the rock. Our body desires its own dismantling - to be seduced and opened. ??
- I liked this quote by Kevin Jorgensen the author included: I used to be really psyched on doing the hardest moves I can, but I don't know, something shifted.... just being part of the landscape on a big beautiful line, for an instant, was what really got me psyched on climbing big, tall lines... for a moment you can actually be a part of that landscape on this feature.
- There is a strange section toward the end where the author talks about sensitivity in climbers' fingers that I had to share: There is also scientific evidence linking areas of increased nerve sensitivity to fantasy (one should get my drift here), and one could conclude rather unscientifically that the accepted notion that boulderers often fantasize about grabbing the holds on their projects is due to the fact that our skin just happens to be the same organ used for sexual pleasure. WHAT??
Overall, very engaging but at times slightly pretentious and strange. Personally, I loved it.
At times hilariously pretentious (even though it isn't trying to be funny), at times extremely thoughtful and insightful, this deeper look at the meaning behind bouldering is a fresh take on the sport. I personally loved it, because it was always either super engaging or so terrible it was funny. Either way, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'd recommend it for any serious climber who boulders.
Some of my favorite quotes:
- We cannot boulder without a rock, and the rock cannot boulder without us. lol. Just funny.
- At its best, bouldering is that subtle skill which all athletics attempts to hone in one way or another - the beauty of controlling the body during spectacular feats of strength, courage, impossibility, and fear. It is an idealism we are chasing when we are bouldering at our finest. Bouldering is an act where our failures highlight the will/body split; that tiny gap - however minuscule and essentially undetectable - revealing to us that, first, we are strangers to our own body and, second, the journey to remedy this alienation (athletics) is a profoundly joyous experience. The author talks a lot about how bouldering is joy distilled, and I love that.
- Joy comes before the desire for difficulty, and athletics are cultural expressions of bodily joy.
- In terms of difficulty... We could imagine a dancer simply jumping as high as she could, or rotating as much as possible. That would feel brutish... we expect more... we want difficulty to be so flawless that it turns itself into something else - grace. This highlights the desire to not just send boulders, but to climb them well. It's an art form, not just a way of getting to the top. The boulderer is concerned with form almost as much as success and will not feel that he has truly mastered a problem until he can do it gracefully.
- Not a particular quote, but there was a section on difficulty and why that doesn't define success. We have to look deeper to define success. The author talks about how dance has been written and spoken about so much as an art form, but climbing hasn't - yet they are very similar. Why can't climbing be spoken about in the same way?
- I liked how the author talked about style within bouldering, and how he can tell a southern boulderer from a Yosemite boulderer, not just by how they dress but by how they move. Their home boulders have marked their bodies and their movement. The way some folks patiently position themselves on a terrible sloper and micro-adjust their bodies expresses years (maybe decades) of an awareness of that type of hold or stone, cultivated by repetition. I myself find that as a two-year-old climber who has spent the majority of her time at the New River Gorge where horizontal edges are separated by long, blank surfaces, I tend to feel comfortable climbing very stretched out with tension and getting my feet very high and locking off. The rock you develop on makes its mark.
- Like the Joyce Carol Oates quote about boxing, "One plays football, one doesn't play boxing," Sanzaro states: One does not play bouldering because it is more of an act than a game. Bouldering is a confrontation with will, self, vulnerability, and courage - there is nothing game-like about it.
- From an environmental standpoint, people are absolutely overcrowding and ruining bouldering areas. We develop boulder areas because we benefit from it, not the other way around. The boulders don't need us, we need them, and we should never forget this.
- I personally have always had a very strong, spiritual connection with nature and connect best with the universe and become my best self by being outdoors in solitude. My relationship with rock climbing is similar; it's a very personal one between myself and the rock, and I'm not particularly keen on sharing that with many other people, despite the trend of "spray", bringing groups to crags, and many folks feeling inclined toward having an audience for their climbing or boasting about it and oversharing on social media. I enjoyed the author's similar perspective: there will always be boulderers who climb their best in solitude, and who do this for the very reason that it is not recorded and there are no crowds. / A boulder problem is an intimate affair... movement itself can be very, very personal, almost secretive... sometimes when I move I do not want an audience, as if that cheapens it. Amen.
- About the commercialization of climbing and people doing it for the wrong reasons: Like all sports that go corporate, the logic of capitalism necessarily follows - speed of execution becomes more valued than depth of experience. Difficulty replaces the joy of movement. He goes on to talk about Julia Child disliking the film Julie & Julia (2009) because it turned great recipes, which take time and patience, and should be enjoyed, into a ticklist that requires only "successful" completion. Back to an earlier point... What is success? When we "tick" an area or a climb and move on, appreciation is lost. With the advent of Mountain Project and ticklists, people are climbing for the wrong reasons and missing the point that the experience and the process are the most important, not the send. Stop being a hyper-consumer and enjoy the movement, the process, the climb itself rather than just the tick or the spray.
- I liked his comparison to gymnastics and dance in terms of platform: in dance there is a flat, unchanging stage; in gymnastics, gymnasts push difficulty on an unchanging apparatus. Even a football player might navigate the added variables of changing bodies, but still on an unchanging apparatus. The boulderer must constantly encounter new movement on a changing apparatus and internalize new forms of stone, adapting to the idiosyncratic qualities that various areas provide. Fontainebleau is known for being technical; Hueco requires more finger agility; Yosemite requires hard boulderers to stand on polished nubs or else settle for moderates. The skilled boulderer digs into their repertoire of movement and adjusts to changing rock formations.
- Bouldering's stage is not homogenous like the flatness of a stage; it's heterogenous: the stone is composed of edges and features. As climbers, we have to adapt more than we create. The challenge is not one of creating a work of art (the problem), but of mastering a pre-existing work of art. I love that, and I think it encapsulates the respect and awe for nature that many outdoor climbers have. I cannot explain how thoroughly inspiring and awesomely beautiful I find nature. Rock formations are no exception. It is utterly fascinating how gorgeous and incredible rocks can be, and we are very lucky to climb on such works of art.
- I just thought this was funny: The rock is not a canvas, painted by us. We are the canvas, painted by the rock. Our body desires its own dismantling - to be seduced and opened. ??
- I liked this quote by Kevin Jorgensen the author included: I used to be really psyched on doing the hardest moves I can, but I don't know, something shifted.... just being part of the landscape on a big beautiful line, for an instant, was what really got me psyched on climbing big, tall lines... for a moment you can actually be a part of that landscape on this feature.
- There is a strange section toward the end where the author talks about sensitivity in climbers' fingers that I had to share: There is also scientific evidence linking areas of increased nerve sensitivity to fantasy (one should get my drift here), and one could conclude rather unscientifically that the accepted notion that boulderers often fantasize about grabbing the holds on their projects is due to the fact that our skin just happens to be the same organ used for sexual pleasure. WHAT??
Overall, very engaging but at times slightly pretentious and strange. Personally, I loved it.
April 13, 2020
Caí en este libro al ver que abarcaba dos pasiones personales: la filosofía y la escalada en bloque o búlder. Y en líneas generales creo que es una obra bastante acertada aunque sin grandes pretensiones de dictar cátedra. La intención de Francis Sanzaro es la de realizar una suerte de de construcción en torno a la casuística que lleva a que esta modalidad de escalada haya experimentado un auge creciente en los últimos años.
Sus poco menos de 200 páginas están repletas de disgregaciones en torno al movimiento, el cuerpo, el dolor, la lucha con la roca, la mística alberga cada bloque, las sensaciones que experimenta nuestra mente cuando se enfrenta a un problema, etc. Aunque en ocasiones puede parecer que está repitiendo alguna de las reflexiones, son más bien el resultado de que las respuestas que van desglosándose a las diferentes preguntas van conectando ese proceso de análisis exhaustivo que hace el autor.
Un libro sincero y apasionado que puede ser del agrado tanto de los interesados en esta disciplina como de los que tengan cierta inquietud por la filosofía del deporte.
Sus poco menos de 200 páginas están repletas de disgregaciones en torno al movimiento, el cuerpo, el dolor, la lucha con la roca, la mística alberga cada bloque, las sensaciones que experimenta nuestra mente cuando se enfrenta a un problema, etc. Aunque en ocasiones puede parecer que está repitiendo alguna de las reflexiones, son más bien el resultado de que las respuestas que van desglosándose a las diferentes preguntas van conectando ese proceso de análisis exhaustivo que hace el autor.
Un libro sincero y apasionado que puede ser del agrado tanto de los interesados en esta disciplina como de los que tengan cierta inquietud por la filosofía del deporte.
December 16, 2018
I had a hard time rating this one.
I absolutely love rope climbing and definitely enjoy bouldering. I've been doing both long enough and at a high enough level that I get what Francis Sanzaro talks about in this book when talking about movement and joy and expression of the body.
I started this book over the summer and just started reading straight through. I got burned out. I had to put it down. Then I would pick it up occasionally and read another chapter. Each chapter stands on its own so I don't think anything was lost doing it this way.
I had to put it down because it was repetitive. Reading it a chapter at a time helped alleviate this.
Even within a chapter, I greatly enjoyed some paragraphs and did not enjoy others.
This book has given me ideas to think about but it also made me realize that I don't think I care about the philosophy of sports.
I absolutely love rope climbing and definitely enjoy bouldering. I've been doing both long enough and at a high enough level that I get what Francis Sanzaro talks about in this book when talking about movement and joy and expression of the body.
I started this book over the summer and just started reading straight through. I got burned out. I had to put it down. Then I would pick it up occasionally and read another chapter. Each chapter stands on its own so I don't think anything was lost doing it this way.
I had to put it down because it was repetitive. Reading it a chapter at a time helped alleviate this.
Even within a chapter, I greatly enjoyed some paragraphs and did not enjoy others.
This book has given me ideas to think about but it also made me realize that I don't think I care about the philosophy of sports.
October 17, 2022
I haven't read a book like this, and I'm really glad I stumbled onto this one.
An academic/theory take on bouldering as a sport and done REALLY well. The same problems with theory apply to this (such as academic/wordy phrases, deep diving into things most people would say "why..." to, etc etc), but it's done really well. It's academic in the right places, informal in the right places, and will lead you to some interesting thoughts about the motivations of sport, the ideas of movement theory, and any and everything in between.
I loved the constant comparisons to dance, the ideas of movement, and the sections that talked about site-specific architecture and how bouldering plays into that.
If you like ~critical theory~, rock climbing, and thought exercises, this book is for you! I will admit, though, that is probably a very small crowd. I'm pretty stoked though that I am part of that crowd! An almost perfect book for me.
An academic/theory take on bouldering as a sport and done REALLY well. The same problems with theory apply to this (such as academic/wordy phrases, deep diving into things most people would say "why..." to, etc etc), but it's done really well. It's academic in the right places, informal in the right places, and will lead you to some interesting thoughts about the motivations of sport, the ideas of movement theory, and any and everything in between.
I loved the constant comparisons to dance, the ideas of movement, and the sections that talked about site-specific architecture and how bouldering plays into that.
If you like ~critical theory~, rock climbing, and thought exercises, this book is for you! I will admit, though, that is probably a very small crowd. I'm pretty stoked though that I am part of that crowd! An almost perfect book for me.
May 26, 2024
While interesting, I felt that this book sometimes found ways to doing basic parts of Bouldering into a far deeper exercise than it is. I found the philosophical parts interesting at times, but other times it seemed to make insights where there probably are none to be gleaned. I’ll see if after book club, my opinion changed
October 14, 2018
Philosophy that you can transfer to your daily struggles.
December 27, 2013
I very rarely give up on books but about half way through I just couldn't face any more. I was reading the short chapters at a painful pace of only about one a day. I found it very hard to learn anything from this book. The language is either imprecise or overly complicated and I was often left wondering whether I'd read anything at all. In the 100 pages I struggled through I don't remember a single thing I think will help my bouldering. I'm giving it 2 stars not 1 to give it the benefit of the doubt that I might just be too stupid or too uneducated to understand it.
January 16, 2014
This book was dope. As I read a lot of philosophy, it was an excellent read for me. The connections the author makes are developed. Great exegesis on grace, style and bruce lee, even film. I've been climbing for 4 years now, and just started bouldering. I would recommend this to anyone wanting to think a bit more about their sport, or about athletics. Helped me climb better.
August 26, 2014
Pretty niche I know but it's an interesting attempt to talk about the sport - although I've never really classed climbing as a sport though; more just something I do for pleasure, a pastime maybe. Little too much on the waffley side but then hey, it's philosophy that's kind of what they do.
January 15, 2014
i actually found this book to be incredibly smart. it took a while to get through it, but once I did, was definitely worth it. I can't say I've read anything like it before. even some discussions of art, architecture, technology
November 17, 2013
An insightful and enjoyable read for any veteran of the sport, looking to expand their perspective, enjoyment, and appreciation of bouldering.
May 30, 2016
Lots of spelling and grammar errors, but overall a great take on the Philosophy behind a beautiful sport.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews