The Best Art and Science of the Walking Cure – Flâneur
Newsletter #1 for Wellness Wednesday
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A 5-Minute Read
I recently came across an interesting concept, during my morning peruse of the BBC, Yahoo News, and the GoodNews.com.
It was a piece about Flâneur, a French noun referring to a person, who "strolls", "or "saunters" with apparently no purpose
Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the noun is boulevardier. Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of contemporary (often industrialized) life.
The flâneur was, first of all, a literary type from 19th-century France, essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. The word carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street. The meaning of the word has changed over the centuries but for our purposes has acquired an additional architecture and urban planning sense, referring to passers-by who experience incidental or intentional psychological effects from the design of a structure.
Flâneur derives from the Old Norse verb flana, "to wander with no purpose". If course from the perspective of Essential Zen walking is a purpose in and unto itself.
The terms of flânerie date to the 16th or 17th century, denoting strolling, idling, often with the connotation of wasting time (though in reality it is not wasting time at all, but rather a form of meditation on people, places, and things).. But it was in the 19th century that a rich set of meanings and definitions surrounding the flâneur took shape.
The flâneur was defined in 1872 in a long article in Pierre Larousse's Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle. It described the flâneur in ambivalent terms, equal parts curiosity and laziness, and presented a taxonomy of flânerie: flâneurs of the boulevards, of parks, of the arcades, of cafés; mindless flâneurs and intelligent ones.
By then, the term had already developed a rich set of associations. Sainte-Beuve wrote that to flâne "is the very opposite of doing nothing".[5] Honoré de Balzac described flânerie as "the gastronomy of the eye".Anaïs Bazin wrote that "the only, the true sovereign of Paris is the flâneur". Victor Fournel, in Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris (What One Sees in the Streets of Paris, 1867), devoted a chapter to "the art of flânerie". For Fournel, there was nothing lazy in flânerie. It was, rather, a way of understanding the rich variety of the city landscape; it was like "a mobile and passionate photograph" ("un daguerréotype mobile et passioné") of urban experience.
With Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Man of the Crowd", the flâneur entered the literary scene. Charles Baudelaire discusses "The Man of the Crowd" in The Painter of Modern Life; it would go on to become a key example in Walter Benjamin's essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire", which theorizes the role of the crowd in modernity. In the 1860s, in the midst of the rebuilding of Paris under Napoleon III and the Baron Haussmann, the French poet, essayist and art critic, Charles Baudelaire presented a memorable portrait of the flâneur as the artist-poet of the modern metropolis.
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus, the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.
But Baudelaire's association of the flâneur with artists and the world of art has been questioned.
Drawing on Fournel, and on his analysis of the poetry of Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin described the flâneur as the essential figure of the modern urban spectator, an amateur detective and investigator of the city. More than this, his flâneur was a sign of the alienation of the city. For Benjamin, the flâneur met his demise with the triumph of consumer capitalism. But of course the prepper, simple living, and minimalist movements ad their reaction to wasteful consumerism have brought flâneurism back into focus.
In these texts, the flâneur was often juxtaposed and contrasted with the figure of the badaud, the gawker or gaper. Fournel wrote: "The flâneur must not be confused with the badaud; a nuance should be observed there .... The simple flâneur is always in full possession of his individuality, whereas the individuality of the badaud disappears. It is absorbed by the outside world ... which intoxicates him to the point where he forgets himself. Under the influence of the spectacle which presents itself to him, the badaud becomes an impersonal creature; he is no longer a human being, he is part of the public, of the crowd."
In the decades since Benjamin, the flâneur has been the subject of a remarkable number of appropriations and interpretations. The figure of the flâneur has been used—among other things – to explain modern, urban experience, to explain urban spectatorship, to explain the class tensions and gender divisions of the nineteenth-century city, to describe modern alienation, to explain the sources of mass culture, to explain the postmodern spectatorial gaze. And it has served as a source of inspiration to writers and artists.
Female Counterparts – The Passante
The historical feminine rough equivalent of the flâneur, the passante (French for 'walker', 'passer-by'), appears in particular in the work of Marcel Proust. He portrayed several of his female characters as elusive, passing figures, who tended to ignore his obsessive (and at times possessive) view of them. Increasing freedoms and social innovations such as industrialization later allowed the passante to become an active participant in the 19th century metropolis, as women's social roles expanded away from the domestic and the private, into the public and urban spheres.
In less academic contexts, such as newspaper book reviews, the grammatically masculine flâneur is also applied to women (including modern ones) in essentially the same senses as for the original male referents, at least in English-language borrowings of the term. However, as these feminist scholars have argued, the word 'flâneuse' implies women's distinctive modalities of conceiving, interacting, occupying, and experiencing space.
Walking in Urban life
While Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a "gentleman stroller of city streets", he saw the flâneur as having a key role in understanding, participating in, and portraying the city. A flâneur thus played a double role in city life and in theory, that is, while remaining a detached observer. This stance, simultaneously part of and apart from, combines sociological, anthropological, literary, and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the greater populace.
The observer–participant dialectic is evidenced in part by the dandy culture. Highly self-aware, and to a certain degree flamboyant and theatrical, dandies were the Noble Tricksters of the mid-nineteenth century. They created scenes through self-consciously outrageous acts like walking turtles on leashes down the streets of Paris. Such acts exemplify a flâneur's active participation in and fascination with street life while displaying a critical attitude towards the uniformity, speed, and anonymity of modern life in the city.
The concept of the flâneur is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity. While Baudelaire's aesthetic and critical visions helped open up the modern city as a space for investigation, theorists such as Georg Simmel began to codify the urban experience in more sociological and psychological terms. In his essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life", Simmel theorized that the complexities of the modern city create new social bonds and new attitudes towards others. The modern city was transforming humans, giving them a new relationship to time and space, inculcating in them a "blasé attitude", and altering fundamental notions of freedom and being:[24]
The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon man to free himself of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Man's nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others. Nietzsche sees the full development of the individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists being leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super-individual contents of life.
Writing in 1962, Cornelia Otis Skinner suggested that there was no English equivalent of the term: "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."
There’s speed-walking, there’s strolling, and then there’s flaneuring. The walking trend inspired by 19th century aristocrats with the luxury to be idle is proving beneficial in an age when it often seems we have anything but free time.
The French term flaneur is not directly translatable to English but essentially means to ramble leisurely — to walk with no purpose other than relaxation and enjoyment, reports Today. The practice is accessible wherever you live, according to Erika Owen, author of The Art of Flaneuring, but ideally should be done in unfamiliar areas. After a move to New York, Owen discovered that taking solo walks and noticing new surroundings left her feeling calm and provided her perspective. And the science backs up her experience.
A recent study on “awe walks” found that older individuals who took weekly 15-minute group walks in unfamiliar areas felt an increased sense of joy and social connectedness, and were even smiling more as the study went on. So next time you step outside for some fresh air, consider leaving your cell phone, podcasts, and fitness trackers behind; find a part of town you’re unfamiliar with, and ramble on.
Walkabout
An early influence in my exploration of Flaneuring is the Australian film Walkabout. Walkabout is a 1971 adventure survival film directed by Nicolas Roeg. Set in the Australian outback, it centers on two white schoolchildren who are left to fend for themselves in the Australian outback and who come across a teenage Aboriginal boy who helps them to survive. In 2005, the British Film Institute included it in their list of the "50 films you should see by the age of 14".
The back story here, is that in Australian aboriginal culture during adolescence, young men, typically ages 10 to 16, go to live in the wilderness for a period as long as six months to make the spiritual and traditional transition into manhood. While doing this they walk from morning to night.
In the case of Aboriginal Australians, life-cycle stages, such as traditional rites of passage, seem to influence the motivations for movement more than the frequency of movement.
Indigenous temporary mobility in and around remote Australia is due to the spiritual ties of the Indigenous people to the land of the Outback. With modernization occurring all across Australia, walkabout will occur in more remote areas such as the outback to create a break from modern culture in order to create a connection with traditional, spiritual roots. Interior Australia (Outback) witnesses temporary mobility in those areas due to the lack of permanent residents in those areas. The spiritual attachment of aboriginals to the land of the Outback was a strong, unbreakable force that rooted social groups within their traditional territories.
The physical geography of the Australian Outback has fundamentally shaped indigenous socio-spatial organization and thus mobility practices. Owing to low population density and the uncharted aura of these areas it is not surprising that the Outback is the typical home to walkabout for aboriginals with ancestral ties to the land.
Walking as Meditation
A few years back I watched a documentary about Thích Nhất Hạnh (October 11, 1926 – January 22 2022) the influential Vietnamese Zen (Thiền Buddhist). Known as the main inspiration for engaged Buddhism, he had created an ashram/monastery/community in France known as Plum Village. Historically recognized as the "father of mindfulness", Nhất Hạnh has been a major influence on Western practices of Buddhism.
One thing I learned from watching the documentary about his life and work, was a walking meditation he did daily. I had known about walking meditation from my early days exploring Vipassana Meditation but had move on to other approaches to spiritual inquiry. The time wasn’t right for me back then to think of simply walking as a form of meditation as it is now.
In the documentary you can observe the great monk walking very slowly for the sake of walking and the mindfulness, and self-awareness it creates. Nothing to do, and no place to go.
I have that same physical freedom as he, though I’m still working on having that level of mental freedom.
Some Final Thoughts
Today when most of us speak about walking we may be speaking about speed-walking, strolling, or hiking. These contain elements of flaneuring yet they are not flaneuring. The walking trend inspired by 19th century aristocrats with the luxury to be idle is proving beneficial in an age when it often seems we have anything but free time. This truly is the walking cure.
Now when I go out walking I do so as a meditation and a chance to embrace the beauty of the people, places, and things passing me by. I have clearly embraced the art, science and general practice of meditative flâneuring.
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Author: Hey there. My name is Lewis Harrison, and I created this newsletter. I am a transformational coach, teacher, and prepper. I am a proponent of entrepreneurism and also a writer and seminar leader. The author of over twenty books, and numerous self-improvement, business success, and personal development courses, I am the former host of a talk show on NPR Affiliated WIOX91.3 FM.
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The article is an excerpt from a seminar I taught based on my book “Spiritual, Not Religious”
https://www.amazon.ca/Spiritual-Not-Religious-Sacred-Modern-ebook/dp/B00I9H41C4
Love this, Lewis!