So we’ll set out for a week this summer, leaving from and returning to Batavia, Illinois: a vacation of a kind, a familiar activity amid new companions, surrounded by new country. The route is marked. The dots are laid. Your maps created for you. In navigating the route, you’ll end up where you started. Or will you?

What does it mean to go somewhere – to go some other place, think some other thought, or be some other way? The departure, the journey itself, the return: Odysseus lost at sea; Quixote abroad in La Mancha; Alice down the rabbit hole. How, in every case, does the journey begin? Do we choose the journey or does the journey choose us? How do we come to know our route? Do we travel alone or with others? When do we know the journey has ended, and how have we returned? What is the world like before, during, and after? And always, no matter the journey, why? Velosophie 2007 will explore these and other questions as we experience and discuss, “The Journey.”

Up for discussion is Jean Jacques Rousseau’s, Walk 5 & Walk 7 of “Reveries of a Solitary Walker” and Chapter XI of Thomas Merton’s “The Love of Solitude” from “Thoughts in Solitude.”

For more information, please call Ryan Lewis at 312.422.5580.