The Great Travel Focus
The Flaneur
How and Where the Most Important Experiences Happen.
Is that so?
How and Where the Most Important Experiences Happen.
Is that so?
Flan, the great key: Flan.
I flan, you flan, he-she-or-it flans,
We flan, you (pl) flan, they flan.
They what? They flan. FLAN. They peruse. Saunter. Whenever requirements and schedules loom, quashing the moment, go flan. Enrich thyself.
Say the flan starts, when it begins to rain during a planned route to The Required Cathedral. The Flan says: Wonderful What happens next.
Wonderful. An opportunity to flan elsewhere, than as planned.
Flan. Mimic, or be, the "disinterested, artistically inclined wanderer..." The flaneur. A flaneur is not someone who makes flans, although it could be. See those allusions and more at http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/archive/2004/08/12.html. The intentional lounge-about.
A flaneur, we now learn, is one who meanders, journeys without a map ordering destinations, as in Edmund White's Flaneur, A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, 2001, see http://www.edmundwhite.com/html/flaneur.htm. He lived in Paris for 16 years, doing as the word suggests: the stroll, the loaf, the idle, giving over to "the spectacle of the moment." English needs that word. Circumnavigation according to whim, as a respected activity. A noble art. Freedom from the ought. View through the eye of a poet, perhaps. If travel generates ideas, the travel was successful.
Beaudelaire: wrong to include isolation, or alienation as necessaries in the mix. See Wordoftheday above.
The text is part of a three-volume series, a Bloomsbury series called "The Writer and the City."
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