I feel like I've finally recovered from a trip I took last weekend. I had some frequent flyer miles sitting around, so I scheduled a weekend trip to San Francisco, my first time in the city. Wow, what a gorgeous place. I did a little bit of playing, a lot of walking, and a whole lot more nothing. I got way too little sleep, and left the city, on Monday (missed the blizzard--yay!!), feeling refreshed, but not really rested.
When I go to a new city, I walk. I love to watch life in the city. The best time is in the morning, when the night people are heading to bed as the city prepares for the day. The residue from the previous night--a syringe here, a baggie there--is still visible, but not for long. Homeless people, those who were't woken up and shuffled off by the police, are waking up. Those that were awake all night sit in small groups talking, or fighting by a fountain. I love to see how the city lives. So, I walk and watch.
I was talking about this with a colleague when I got back, and she said, "Oh, you're a flâneur." I had never heard of the word before. Here's part of the wikipedia entry [1]:
"Flâneur" is a French word. A flâneur is a detached pedestrian observer of a metropolis, a 'gentleman stroller of city streets', first identified by Charles Baudelaire. The word has no exact equivalent in English....Around 1850, Baudelaire began asserting that traditional art was inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life. Social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that the artist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, in Baudelaire's phrase, 'a botanist of the sidewalk', an analytical connoisseur of the urban fabric. Because he coined the word about Parisians, the 'flâneur' (the one who strolls) and the 'flânerie' (the stroll) are associated with Paris and the kind of pedestrian environment which accommodates leisurely exploration.
Walter Benjamin adopted this concept of the urban observer both as an analytical tool, and as a lifestyle. From his Marxist standpoint Benjamin describes the flâneur as a product of modern life and the Industrial Revolution, unprecedented in history and definitely of a certain social class, parallel to the advent of the tourist. His flâneur is an uninvolved but highly perceptive bourgeois dilettante.
OK, I'm not sure how I feel about being described as a dilettante, but the concept fascinates me. It's pretty much the standard way i travel, particularly when in a new city. Whenever I go to a new place, people are surpised by how little I "do." My parents called me on Sunday night, in part to see if I'd gotten caught up in the blizzard (I wasn't scheduled to return to Boston until Monday, so it didn't have any effect on my travels). My mother was surprised when I said how little I'd done: "But I thought you were going to a few museums."
"So did I," I replied. Instead, I'd just been walking. And looking.
Looks like I need to read some Benjamin.
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