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ASTONISH YOURSELF: 101 EXPERIMENTS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVERYDAY LIFE Roger-Pol Droit

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ASTONISH YOURSELF

1. Call yourself 2. Empty a word of its meaning 3. Look in vain for “I” 4. Make the world last twenty minutes 5. See the stars below you 6. See a landscape as a stretched canvas 7. Lose something and not know what 8. Recall where you were this morning 9. Hurt yourself briefly 10. Feel eternal 11. Telephone at random 12. Rediscover your room after a journey 13. Drink while urinating 14. Make a wall between your hands 15. Walk in the dark 16. Dream of all the places in the world 17. Peel an apple in your head 18. Imagine yourself high up 19. Imagine your imminent death 20. Try to measure existence 21. Count to a thousand 22. Dread the arrival of the bus 23. Run in a graveyard 24. Play the fool 25. Watch a woman at her window 26. Invent lives for yourself 27. Look at people from a moving car 28. Follow the movement of ants 29. Eat a nameless substance 30. Watch dust in the sun 31. Resist tiredness 32. Overeat 33. Play the animal 34. Contemplate a dead bird 35. Come across a childhood toy 36. Wait while doing nothing 37. Try not to think 38. Go to the hairdresser 39. Shower with your eyes closed 40. Sleep on your front in the sun 41. Go to the circus 42. Try on clothes

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ASTONISH YOURSELF

43. Calligraphize 44. Light a fire in the hearth 45. Be aware of yourself speaking 46. Weep at the cinema 47. Meet up with friends after several years 48. Browse at the bookseller's 49. Become music 50. Pull out a hair 51. Walk in an imaginary forest 52. Demonstrate on your own 53. Stay in the hammock 54. Invent headlines 55. Listen to short-wave radio 56. Turn off the sound on the TV 57. Rediscover a childhood scene that seemed larger 58. Get used to eating something you don't like 59. Fast for a while 60. Rand for ten minutes 61. Drive through a forest 62. Give without thinking about it 63. Look for a blue food 64. Become a saint or sinner 65. Recover lost memories 66. Watch someone sleeping 67. Work on a holiday 68. Consider humanity to be an error 69. Inhabit the planet of small gestures 70. Disconnect the phone 71. Smile at a stranger 72. Enter the space of a painting 73. Leave the cinema in daytime 74. Plunge into cold water 75. Seek out immutable landscapes 76. Listen to a recording of your voice 77. Tell a stranger she is beautiful 78. Believe in the existence of a smell 79. Wake up without knowing where 80. Descend an interminable staircase 81. Swallow your emotion 82. Fix the ephemeral 83. Decorate a room 84. Laugh at an idea

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ASTONISH YOURSELF

85. Vanish at a pavement cafe 86. Row on a lake in your room 87. Prowl at night 88. Become attached to an object 89. Sing the praises of Santa Claus 90. Play with a child 91. Encounter pure chance 92. Recite the telephone directory on your knees 93. Think about what other people are doing 94. Practice make-believe everywhere 95. Kill people in your head 96. Take the subway without going anywhere 97. Remove your watch 98. Put up with a chatterbox 99. Clean up after the party 100. Find the infinitesimal caress 101. Etc.

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