Flaneur

Last weekend, ______ and I walked the streets of London until I was walking on the sides of my chapped feet. From nine in the morning to six at night: Baker Street, Regent Park, steal a break at Starbucks, Soho, dodge buses, Covent Garden, breathe in all sorts of places outlying and in between. We ticked away the day with our pendulum legs the entire time (like all those beautiful clocks I studied at the British Museum). By the time we flopped on our beds at the Royal National Hotel, our screaming heels were drowned out by the silly peals of laughter born only from satisfied exhaustion.

I miss things when I don’t walk. I miss making up walking games down the sidewalk; step three times in between each segment without touching the cracks (step on a crack, break your mother’s back). Our mothers teach us to look both ways when we cross the street. London tells you to Look Left or Look Right, depending on which street you’re crossing. (I looked both ways anyway.)

Riding a bus or driving a car is often necessary—belive me, the next day, ______ and I rode plenty of buses, and our feet were less spiteful—but it’s also window shopping. You can see the shape of something through glass, but you can’t run your fingers over it or smell and taste it in the back of your throat. You can’t keep it.

I can only think of this:

There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell's dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city. (Cornelia Otis Skinner, Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals, 1962, Houghton Mifflin, New York)

I want to be a flaneur of the world. But, still, even that isn’t enough sometimes. We pass through people like cities, stopping in doorways when someone opens up and glancing through windows when they don’t. You can know a building—you can sketch its corners blindfolded, know the exact shade of every patch of wallpaper, anticipate the echo of every room you walk in—but you can’t feel it; you can know people, but you can’t. I have to remind myself this is okay, that I am allowed to simply enjoy something in passing with no need for absolute understanding, that complete knowledge is impossible. (Why are there so many why’s? You nail one down and end up splitting it in two.) No matter how deep you go, you are always walking somewhere on the outside.

(But that’s all right. It’s good for your health.)

Flaneur