With out unstifled entry to our metropolis’s tree-lined streets and architectural marvels, New York’s amblers are left trapped in tiny residences and cluttered places of work. After we go exterior, the domination of automobiles, scooters and bicycles imprison us in public. They set off omnipresent skirmishes, dodges and clenches of the jaw. Right now it too usually feels as if crossing the road at a “Stroll” gentle just isn’t a proper a lot as a pleading negotiation — as if my free motion is begrudgingly, charitably permitted by glittery-eyed, two-ton monsters that inch impatiently ahead, resentful to have relinquished valuable seconds.
New York in the present day feels a universe away from the town roamed by the writers I like. One may marvel what sort of literature they’d make right here now, in a metropolis that appears to envelop us in restrictive, ambient anxiousness fairly than lyrical inspiration — and in ever extra innovatively disruptive methods.
A metropolis that not accommodates wandering not accommodates questioning, too, and a flâneur with out freedom falls right into a form of zombified routine. I’ve began to restrict my walks exterior, and even fast journeys to the grocery retailer, fitness center and native espresso store can take the type of impediment programs with hazardous stakes. As a result of free metropolis strolling has turn out to be so encumbered, so subordinate to wheeled expediency, I’ve discovered my ideas extra liable to distraction, tautology and the dysfunction of reflexive associations. Now I tempo round my condominium so as to assume by my essays, however dwindling are these surprising connections between concepts — the rewards of spontaneous tangents jostled into discovery by discursive motion. My interior voice has quieted, my interior life dulled, all whereas, exterior, the roar of engines and the clamor of disharmony are louder than ever.
Maybe essentially the most philosophically priceless facet of flânerie is the diploma to which it returns us to an analog habitat. If we’re collectively inclined to drown out our interior voices with TV exhibits, courting apps, on-line screeds and looping movies, an extended stroll exterior doesn’t simply serve to politely wrench us out of tiny rooms and away from tiny screens. It additionally permits the interior voice to emerge from slumber, to have interaction with itself, and thus, for the thoughts to seek out itself as soon as once more. Nietzsche glorified concepts “received by strolling” exactly as a result of they’re born of this redemptive self-consciousness.
In Baudelaire’s “A Misplaced Halo,” an angelic poet anxiously crosses a busy boulevard. He journeys and falls, and his halo slips off his head and onto the muddy avenue. He leaves it behind, scared of barreling horses and carriages, however he finds a silver lining within the forfeiture: “Now I can go about incognito,” he says, “do dangerous issues, and bask in vulgar habits like extraordinary mortals.” On this magical metropolis, we certainly can not afford to relinquish particular person duty, to offer in to anarchy, to go away our halos within the mud. Our freedom, epiphanies and interior lives dangle within the steadiness.
