Hello friends,
Vizi here. GM from Transylvania 🌅
As previously declared, writing a newsletter on a frequent basis is not my superpower.
I write only when I feel inspired; as per Nassim Taleb’s model:
Why should you read something that I myself didn’t want to write? Why should you read something I wasn’t excited about? Writing isn’t about “producing” content—it’s about transferring energy, tension, and desire.
This is maybe a terrible model if you want to make a living as a writer. To keep my (minimalist) branding agency going, I try to be systematic, productive, and efficient. But in art—in order to keep it sacred—I prioritize serendipity, wonder, slowness, and even procrastination.
I don’t feel like writing except in explosive states, in a climate of intense or abject feelings. Inspiration is simply a sudden spiritual imbalance I take advantage of.
I haven’t written much in “moderate” frames of mind. I don’t pick up my notebook when I’m slightly disgusted or somewhat euphoric. I pick up my notebook when I’m brimming with joy, vanity, or frustration.
The good news?
I wrote a lot lately! So buckle up for more newsletters 👑
3 Aphorisms from my book
I.
To live well, don’t look for answers.
Learn to love the questions.
Life is much more about wonder, adventure, and reflection rather than evidence, order, and direction.
II.
Kindness without truth comes across as flattery. Truth without kindness comes across as disrespect. Those who manage to find the sweet spot are the most persuasive.
III.
If you’re not obsessed with tradition; if you don’t understand it—you will never be able to innovate.
You won’t come up with anything original if you don’t take the time to study what’s truly timeless and perennial.
You can’t blossom if you’re at war with your roots.
Your work will not last; it will likely be hollow and meaningless.
How to Take Walks
I JUDGE THE QUALITY of a city by the quality of the (long) walks you can take. Madrid is thus an elite city. It feels like a great book. The more often you go back to it, the better it gets. Visiting Madrid only once is like reading The Brothers Karamazov in just one sitting.
Madrid is perfect for flâneuring. It has the ideal combination of order and variety—organized complexity. It’s fractal. There are a few boulevards but also many little streets that allow you to get a little bit lost.
In contrast, Barcelona is too orderly for my taste. It’s very pretty but lacks sprezzatura. It gets boring and repetitive at some point. There’s not enough mystery. The problem with Barcelona is that taking a (long) walk is a very predictable process. There are little to no surprises. Exactly like their football style.
Barcelona largely feels like a rigid, modernist city but with palm trees. My bet is that, if it weren’t for its spectacular façades and the (Catalan) Art Nouveau legacy left by Gaudí, Cadafalch, and Vilaseca—the city would lose more than 80% of its charm.
Barcelona’s superblocks are amazing. The issue is simple: scale. There are too many of them. Creating a few such neighborhoods is pleasant and even desirable! But create 8-9 and it gets boring. Madrid, on the other hand, feels alive. Someone is in charge; but its organic fabric conveys that the city truly has a Latin soul.
Barcelona also has a fractal area: the old town. But the old town is way too small—not to mention full of tourists. And, indeed, Madrid also has 2 central, non-fractal neighborhoods (Ibiza & Salamanca) but they’re still not as rigidly planned as (almost the whole city of) Barcelona is.
Extra Note: Palermo, Catania, Torino, Delft, Leiden, Valencia, Seville, Budapest, Bucharest, Sibiu, and Brașov are other examples of towns/cities that are nice for flâneuring. But what else? Feel free to leave a comment 🥂
MANY OF THE GREATEST artists and thinkers in history cited (very) long walks as the blueprint for building a healthy and strong mind.
Montaigne. Nietzsche. Virginia Woolf. Jane Austen. Wittgenstein. Kafka. Carl Jung. Rousseau. Kant. Charles Dickens. Thomas Hardy. Murakami. George Sand. Sylvia Plath. Simone de Beauvoir. Gustav Klimt. Paul Cézanne. George Orwell. Roger Scruton. Mircea Eliade. Lucian Blaga. Georges Simenon. Umberto Eco. Bertrand Russell.
Dylan O’Sullivan deserves credit for kickstarting this trend; I compiled a list with some of the best quotes on how to take walks:
“Whenever I spend a day talking, I feel exhausted; if I spend it walking, I am pleasantly tired.” Thomas A. Clark
“Never lose your desire to walk! Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness.” Kierkegaard
“Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods in order to keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.” Henry David Thoreau
“When you walk, you move more than the body—you move the mind and the spirit. As you traverse spatial distance, you gain vital spiritual distance with which to see afresh the problems that haunt your day, your work, your life. Ideas collide and connect in ways they never would have on the static plane. Pains are left behind in the forward motion. Doubts fall away by the footfall. I do my best writing on foot—the rest, what happens at the desk, is mere transcription.” Maria Popova
“I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; at some point, a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me—and an upheaval out of all proportion to this utterly insignificant event—thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions, only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of… This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I decided to keep walking.” Emil Cioran
“Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. You need to breathe. You need to be. Opt for privacy and solitude. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. That doesn’t make you antisocial. Steal some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self.” Albert Camus
Introducing KronArête
I’ve launched the project I always wanted to see in the world 🤩
The mission is to challenge you with a new philosophy of work & leisure. An avant-garde Dolce Far Niente. We want to rediscover higher pleasures and grasp what the Romans meant by Otium.
Q: How can we bridge the gap between philosophy and entertainment? That’s what this project is about—learning to love and live this question instead of rushing to answer it.
Wrapping up...
Hope you liked this episode!
Any feedback, suggestion, or criticism is welcome.
Thank you for your time,
Vizi Andrei
If you judge a city by the quality of its walks, then there is one city that must reign supreme — not just as a place to flâner, but as the very birthplace of flânerie itself. Paris.
To walk in Paris is not just to move through space, but to step into a palimpsest where every street, every courtyard, every passage is layered with centuries of thought, rebellion, poetry, and seduction. It is a city that does not merely permit wandering but demands it. One does not stroll in Paris. One converses with ghosts, eavesdrops on history, brushes against the edges of revolutions, romances, and existential crises.
Madrid may be a great book, but Paris is a vast, ever-expanding library, where every return visit yields new discoveries, where every deviation from the usual route unveils an unsuspected treasure.
Why is Paris the ultimate city for walking? Because it is designed for it. Not by an algorithm, not by an urban planner with a fetish for symmetry, but by centuries of errant poets, anarchists, dreamers, and rogues. The boulevards of Haussmann may seem like a counterpoint to the labyrinthine medieval streets, but together they create a perfect tension — order and improvisation, symmetry and surprise.
It is a city where the Seine is not a mere river but a ribbon of philosophy, dividing the mind (the Right Bank) from the soul (the Left Bank). It is a place where a wrong turn might lead you to the house where Baudelaire despaired, the café where Sartre pontificated, or the bench where Proust recalled a childhood madeleine.
Paris is fractal in the most Parisian way — both highly structured and endlessly unpredictable. The grand perspectives of the Champs-Élysées lead to the hidden alleys of the Marais, the dizzying avenues of Montmartre wind down into forgotten courtyards and secret staircases. A flâneur in Paris is not merely a wanderer but an archaeologist of the ephemeral.
And if a city is truly great for walking, it must be able to reinvent itself with each passerby. Here, the same street walked in the morning is different by twilight; the same bridge crossed in solitude at dawn is transformed by the lovers who lean on it at night.
To walk in Paris is to understand why Balzac, Hugo, Colette, Benjamin, and Debord wrote about it the way lovers write about lost embraces. It is to understand why Walter Benjamin called it “the capital of the 19th century” — and why, despite the global homogenisation of cities, Paris remains stubbornly and deliciously itself.
You don’t read “The Brothers Karamazov” in one sitting? Fair enough. But Paris is a novel you will never finish reading.
P.S. yes, I’m very biased. It’s my city.
Hi Vizi! I’m from Spain, and I completely agree—Barcelona is quite boring to walk around (I know this firsthand since I lived there for three years). In contrast, cities with an Arabic-style layout, like my hometown of Córdoba, are fantastic for exploring. It’s easy to get lost, but that’s part of the charm. Countries like Morocco and Turkey also have great cities for wandering.