Wanderlust: A History of Walking (30 page)

Two days before the end of the year, I went to one of the local liquor stores for milk early one Sunday morning. Around the corner a guy was sitting in a doorway drinking and singing falsetto, with that knack some local drunks have for sounding like fallen angels. The word
Alooooone
trilled out of nowhere, echoing beautifully in the stairwell. On my way back I saw him weaving so intently down the street he didn't notice me pass a few feet away. Merely walking seemed to take all the singer's concentration, as though he were forcing himself through an atmosphere that had become thick around him. When I started watering the tree in front of my building, he was still winding around the corner. The old lady who always wears a dress and always speaks so politely in word-salad non sequiturs was walking in the other direction. I said hello to her as she passed me, but she didn't notice me any more than he did. All of a sudden, when she had reached the same point on her side of the street that he had on his, she broke into a sort of soft-shoe shuffle that carried on until she turned out of sight down the
facing corner. The two of them seemed to be listening to some inaudible music that carried them along and made them joyous as well as haunted.

Later on the churchgoers would appear. When I first moved here, there were no cafés, and all the churchgoers walked—on Sunday mornings the streets were busy and sociable with black women in resplendent hats, walking in all directions to their churches, not with the dogged steps of pilgrims but with the festive stride of celebrants. That was long ago; gentrification has dispersed the Baptist congregations to other neighborhoods, from which many now drive to church. Young African-American men still saunter by, their legs nonchalant while their arms and shoulders jump around as though staking a bodily territory, but most of the churchgoers have been replaced on the sidewalks these weekend mornings by joggers and dog walkers pumping towards that great secular temple of the middle class, the garden as represented by Golden Gate Park, while the hung-over drift towards the cafés. But this early the street belonged to us three walkers, or to the two of them, for they made me feel like a ghost drifting through their private lives out in public on that cold, sunny Sunday morning, in the communal solitude of urban walkers.

P
ARIS
,
OR
B
OTANIZING ON THE
A
SPHALT

Parisians inhabit their public gardens and streets as though they were salons and corridors, and their cafés face the street and overflow into it as though the theater of passersby were too interesting to neglect even for the duration of a drink. Nude bronze and marble women are everywhere out of doors, standing on pedestals and springing from walls as though the city were both museum and boudoir, while victory arches and pillars punctuate the avenues like the yonis and lingams of a militant sexuality. Streets turn into courtyards, the largest buildings wrap around other courtyards that are actually parks, the national buildings are as long as avenues, and avenues are lined with trees and chairs just like the parks. Everything—houses, churches, bridges, walls—is the same sandy gray so that the city seems like a single construction of inconceivable complexity, a sort of coral reef of high culture. All this makes Paris seem porous, as though private thought and public acts were not so separate here as elsewhere, with walkers flowing in and out of reveries and revolutions. More than any other city, it has entered the paintings and novels of those under its sway, so that representation and reality reflect each other like a pair of facing mirrors, and walking Paris is often described as reading, as though the city itself were a huge anthology of tales. It exerts a magnetic attraction over its citizens and its visitors, for it has always been the capital of refugees and exiles as well as of France.

“Now a landscape, now a room,” Walter Benjamin wrote of the walker's
experience of Paris. Benjamin is one of the great scholars of cities and the art of walking them, and Paris drew him into its recesses as it had drawn so many before, coming to overshadow all the other subjects of his writing during the last decade before his death in 1940. He first visited Paris in 1913 and returned for longer and longer visits until he finally settled there at the end of the 1920s. Even in writing of his birthplace, Berlin, Benjamin's words wandered toward Paris. “Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for quite a different schooling. Then signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a crackling twig under his feet, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its center. Paris taught me this art of straying,” he said in his essay on his Berlin childhood. “It fulfilled a dream that had shown its first traces in the labyrinths on the blotting pages of my school exercise books.” He had been brought up as a good turn-of-the-century German to revere mountains and forests—a photograph of him as a child shows him holding an alpenstock before some painted Alps, and his wealthy family often took long vacations in the Black Forest and Switzerland—but his enthusiasm for cities was both a rejection of that musty romanticism and an immersion in modernism's urbanism.

Cities fascinated him as a kind of organization that could only be perceived by wandering or by browsing, a spatial order in contrast to the tidily linear temporal order of narratives and chronologies. In that Berlin essay, he speaks of a revelation he had in a Paris café—“it had to be in Paris, where the walls and quays, the places to pause, the collections and the rubbish, the railings and the squares, the arcades and the kiosks, teach a language so singular”—that his whole life could be diagrammed as a map or a labyrinth, as though space rather than time were its primary organizing structure. His
Moscow Diary
mixed his own life into an account of that city, and he wrote a book whose form seems to mimic a city,
One-Way Street,
a subversive confection of short passages titled as though they were city sites and signs—Gas Station, Construction Site, Mexican Embassy, Manorially Furnished Ten-Room Apartment, Chinese Curios. If a narrative is like a single continuous path, this book's many short narratives are like a warren of streets and alleys.

He was himself a great wanderer of streets. I picture Benjamin walking the
streets of Paris—“I don't think I ever saw him walk with his head erect. His gait had something unmistakable about it, something pensive and tentative, which was probably due to his shortsightedness,” said one friend—passing without noticing another exile with worse eyesight, James Joyce, who lived there from 1920 to 1940. There is a sort of symmetry between the exiled Catholic who had written a novel studded and layered with obscure information about a Jew wandering the streets of Dublin and the exiled Berlin Jew strolling the Paris streets while writing lyrical histories about a Catholic—Charles Baudelaire—walking and writing the streets of Paris. The kind of homage Joyce received in his lifetime has come far later to Benjamin, with the rediscovery of his works first in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s and later in English. He has become the patron saint of cultural studies, and his writing has spawned hundreds more essays and books. It may be the hybrid nature of this writing—more or less scholarly in subject, but full of beautiful aphorisms and leaps of imagination, a scholarship of evocation rather than definition—that has made him so rich a source for further interpreters. His Parisian studies have been of particular interest—he left a huge collection of quotes and notes for an unwritten book, the
Arcades Project,
which would have expanded further on the linked subjects of Baudelaire, Paris, the Parisian arcades, and the figure of the flâneur. It was he who named Paris “the capital of the nineteenth century” and he who made the flâneur a topic for academics at the end of the twentieth.

What exactly a flâneur is has never been satisfactorily defined, but among all the versions of the flâneur as everything from a primeval slacker to a silent poet, one thing remains constant: the image of an observant and solitary man strolling about Paris. It says something about the fascination public life exerted over Parisians that they developed a term to describe one of its types, and something about French culture that it theorized even strolling. The word only became common usage in the early nineteenth century, and its origins are shrouded. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson says it comes from “old Scandinavian (
flana, courir etourdiment ca et la
[to run giddily here and there]),” while Elizabeth Wilson writes, “The nineteenth-century
Encylopedie Larousse
suggests that the term may be derived from an Irish word for ‘libertine.' The writers of this edition of Larousse devoted a long article to the flâneur, whom they defined as a loiterer, a fritterer away of time. They associated him with the new urban pastimes of shopping and crowd watching. The flâneur, Larousse pointed out, could exist only in the great
city, the metropolis, since provincial towns would afford too restricted a stage for his strolling.”

Benjamin himself never clearly defined the flâneur, only associated him with certain things: with leisure, with crowds, with alienation or detachment, with observation, with walking, particularly with strolling in the arcades—from which it can be concluded that the flâneur was male, of some means, of a refined sensibility, with little or no domestic life. The flâneur arose, Benjamin argues, at a period early in the nineteenth century when the city had become so large and complex that it was for the first time strange to its inhabitants. Flâneurs were a recurrent subject of the feuilletons—the serialized novels in the newly popularized newspapers—and the
physiologies,
those popular publications that purported to make strangers familiar but instead underscored their strangeness by classifying them as species one could identify on sight, like birds or flowers. In the nineteenth century, the idea of the city so intrigued and overwhelmed its inhabitants that they eagerly devoured guidebooks to their own cities as modern tourists peruse those of other cities.

The crowd itself seemed to be something new in human experience—a mass of strangers who would remain strange—and the flâneur represented a new type, one who was, so to speak, at home in this alienation: “The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird's, and water that of the fish,” wrote Baudelaire in a famous passage often used to define flâneurs. “His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere . . .” The flâneur, Benjamin wrote in his most famous passage on the subject, “goes botanizing on the asphalt. But even in those days it was not possible to stroll about everywhere in the city. Before Haussmann [remodeled the city] wide pavements were rare, and the narrow ones afforded little protection from vehicles. Strolling could hardly have assumed the importance it did without the arcades.” “Arcades,” he wrote elsewhere, “where the flâneur would not be exposed to the sight of carriages that did not recognize pedestrians as rivals were enjoying undiminished popularity. There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flâneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of a gentleman of leisure.” One demonstration of this leisureliness, Benjamin goes on to say, was the fashion,
around 1840, for taking turtles for walks in the arcades. “The flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them. If they had their way, progress would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this pace.”

His final, unfinished work, the
Arcades Project,
was devoted to teasing out the meanings of these shopping arcades that had arisen during the first decades of that century. The arcades intensified the blurring of interior and exterior: they were pedestrian streets paved with marble and mosaic and flanked by shops, they had roofs made of the new building materials of steel and glass, and they were the first places in Paris to be lit by the new gaslight. Precursors of Paris's great department stores (and later America's shopping malls), they were elegant environments for selling luxury goods and accommodating idle strollers. The arcades allowed Benjamin to link his fascination with the stroller to other, more Marxist themes. The flâneur, visually consuming goods and women while resisting the speed of industrialization and the pressure to produce, is an ambiguous figure, both resistant to and seduced by the new commercial culture. The solitary walker in New York or London experiences cities as atmosphere, architecture, and stray encounters; the promenader in Italy or El Salvador encounters friends or flirts; the flâneur, the descriptions suggest, hovers on the fringes, neither solitary nor social, experiencing Paris as an intoxicating abundance of crowds and goods.

The only problem with the flâneur is that he did not exist, except as a type, an ideal, and a character in literature. The flâneur is often described as detective-like in his aloof observation of others, and feminist scholars have debated whether there were or could be female flâneurs—but no literary detective has found and named an actual individual who qualifies or was known as a flâneur (Kierkegaard, were he less prolific and less Danish, might be the best candidate). No one has named an individual who took a tortoise on a walk, and all who refer to this practice use Benjamin as their source (though during the flâneurs' supposed heyday, the writer Gérard de Nerval famously took a lobster on walks, with a silk ribbon for a leash, but he did so in parks rather than arcades, and for metaphysical rather than foppish reasons). No one quite fulfilled the idea of the flâneur, but everyone engaged in some version of flâneury. Benjamin to the contrary, it was not only “possible to stroll about everywhere in the city” but widely done. The solitary walker in other cities has often been a marginal figure, shut out of the private life that takes place between intimates and inside buildings—
but in nineteenth-century Paris, real life was in public, on the street and among society.

Paris before Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann's massive remodeling of the city from 1853 to 1870 was still a medieval city. “Narrow crevices,” Victor Hugo calls “those obscure, contracted, angular lanes, bordered by ruins eight stories high. . . . The street was narrow and the gutter wide, the passerby walked along a pavement which was always wet, beside shops that were like cellars, great stone blocks encircled with iron, immense garbage heaps. . . .” It was a remarkably unsegregated city: the very courtyard of the Louvre had a kind of slum built into it, and the outdoor arcade-courtyard of the Palais Royale offered sex, luxury goods, books, and drinks for sale, while social spectacles and political discourse were free. In 1835 the writer Frances Trollope went out to shop in a fashionable boutique “which I reached without any other adventure than being splashed twice and nearly run over thrice”; on her way back with her parcels she stopped to look at “the monuments raised over some half-dozen or half-score of revolutionary heroes, who fell and were buried on a spot at no great distance from the fountain” and eavesdropped, along with a gathering crowd, on an artisan telling his daughter why he and those heroes fought in 1830. On other days she reported on an uprising and on the fashionable promenaders of the boulevard des Italiens. Shopping and revolution, ladies and artisans, mingled on these dirty, enchanted streets.

A Moroccan who had visited Paris in 1845–46 was impressed by the pedestrian life there: “In Paris there are places where people take walks, which is one of their forms of entertainment. A fellow takes the arm of his friend, man or woman, and together they go to one of the spots known for it. They stroll along, chatting and taking in the sights. Their idea of an outing is not eating or drinking, and certainly not sitting. One of their favorite promenades is a place called the Champs-Élysées.” The popular places for strolling were the Champs-Élysées, the Tuileries gardens, the avenue de la Reine, the Palais Royale, and the boulevard des Italiens, all on the right bank, and the Jardin des Plantes and Luxembourg Gardens on the left, where Baudelaire had grown up. Writing to his mother in 1861, Baudelaire recollected their “long walks and constant affection! I recall the quais, so sad in the evenings,” and a friend remembered that when the poet was young they had “strolled about all evening on the boulevards and in the Tuileries” together.