Who has not felt, at least once in their life, the desire to get away from the world? Who has not dreamed of leaving everything and disappearing? The temptation to escape, the fuga mundi motif, is recurrent in our culture because it remains alive throughout history, always provoking a mixture of fascination, nostalgia, and quiet remorse.
To follow his trail, from the flight into the desert preached in the fourth century by Christian hermitism to the exalted praise of escape sung by the hippies of the 1960s, the sociologist Rémy Oudghiri has rid himself of the usual tools of his trade — studies, surveys and statistics—to be guided by a dozen books and authors, from Petrarch to Rousseau, from Flaubert to Tolstoy, from Simenon and Emmanuel Bove to Le Clézio and Pascal Quignard. Because literature encompasses all registers, from emotion to reason, and does not disdain any method, f...read more
