by Without unlimited access to our city’s tree-lined streets and architectural wonders, New York’s homeless are trapped in small apartments and crowded offices. When we take to the streets, the dominance of cars, scooters and bicycles imprisons us in public, causing skirmishes, dodges and ubiquitous jaw-clenching. Nowadays, I too often feel as if crossing the street at a traffic light is not so much a right as a pleading negotiation, as if my free movement is grudgingly and charitably permitted by bright-eyed two-ton monsters advancing impatiently. , resentful for having given up precious seconds.
New York today feels like a universe far from the city where the writers I love roamed. One might wonder what kind of literature they would make here now, in a city that seems to envelop us in restrictive environmental anxiety rather than lyrical inspiration, and in increasingly innovative and disruptive ways.
A city that no longer has room for wandering no longer has room wonder, too, and a flâneur without freedom falls into a kind of zombified routine. I’ve started limiting my walks outside, and even quick trips to the grocery store, gym, and local coffee shop can take the form of obstacle courses with dangerous stakes. Because walking freely around the city has become so cumbersome, so subordinate to the convenience of wheels, I have found that my thoughts are more prone to distraction, tautology, and the disorder of reflective associations. Now I walk around my apartment to think about my essays, but there are fewer and fewer of those unexpected connections between ideas: the rewards of spontaneous tangents pushed toward discovery by discursive movement. My inner voice has calmed, my inner life has dulled, while, outside, the roar of the engines and the clamor of discord are louder than ever.
Perhaps the most philosophically valuable aspect of flânerie is the degree to which it returns us to an analogical habitat. If we’re collectively inclined to drown out our inner voices with TV shows, dating apps, online articles, and looping videos, a long walk outside doesn’t just serve to politely usher us out of small rooms and small screens. It also allows the inner voice to emerge from lethargy, engage with itself, and thus allow the mind to find itself once again. Nietzsche glorified ideas “earned by walking” precisely because they are born from this redemptive self-awareness.
In Baudelaire’s “A Lost Halo,” an angelic poet anxiously crosses a busy boulevard. He trips and falls, and his halo slides off his head and onto the muddy street. He leaves it behind, fearful of the horses and carriages, but finds a silver lining in the confiscation: “Now I can go around incognito,” he says, “do bad things and indulge in vulgar behavior like ordinary mortals.” In this magical city, we surely cannot afford to renounce individual responsibility, to give in to anarchy, to leave our halos in the mud. Our freedom, epiphanies and inner life are at stake.
