Without unstifled access to our city’s tree-lined streets and architectural marvels, New York’s amblers are left trapped in tiny apartments and cluttered offices. When we go outside, the domination of cars, scooters and bicycles imprison us in public. They trigger omnipresent skirmishes, dodges and clenches of the jaw. Today it too often feels as if crossing the street at a “Walk” light is not a right so much as a pleading negotiation — as if my free movement is begrudgingly, charitably permitted by glittery-eyed, two-ton monsters that inch impatiently forward, resentful to have relinquished precious seconds.
New York today feels a universe away from the city roamed by the writers I love. One might wonder what kind of literature they would make here now, in a city that seems to envelop us in restrictive, ambient anxiety rather than lyrical inspiration — and in ever more innovatively disruptive ways.
A city that no longer accommodates wandering no longer accommodates wondering, too, and a flâneur without freedom falls into a sort of zombified routine. I’ve started to limit my walks outside, and even quick trips to the grocery store, gym and local coffee shop can take the form of obstacle courses with hazardous stakes. Because free city walking has become so encumbered, so subordinate to wheeled expediency, I’ve found my thoughts more prone to distraction, tautology and the disorder of reflexive associations. Now I pace around my apartment in order to think through my essays, but dwindling are those unexpected connections between ideas — the rewards of spontaneous tangents jostled into discovery by discursive movement. My inner voice has quieted, my inner life dulled, all while, outside, the roar of engines and the clamor of disharmony are louder than ever.
Perhaps the most philosophically valuable aspect of flânerie is the degree to which it returns us to an analog habitat. If we’re collectively inclined to drown out our inner voices with TV shows, dating apps, online screeds and looping videos, a long walk outside doesn’t just serve to politely wrench us out of tiny rooms and away from tiny screens. It also allows the inner voice to emerge from slumber, to engage with itself, and thus, for the mind to find itself once again. Nietzsche glorified ideas “won by walking” precisely because they’re born of this redemptive self-consciousness.
In Baudelaire’s “A Lost Halo,” an angelic poet anxiously crosses a busy boulevard. He trips and falls, and his halo slips off his head and onto the muddy street. He leaves it behind, fearful of barreling horses and carriages, but he finds a silver lining in the forfeiture: “Now I can go about incognito,” he says, “do bad things, and indulge in vulgar behavior like ordinary mortals.” In this magical city, we surely cannot afford to relinquish individual responsibility, to give in to anarchy, to leave our halos in the mud. Our freedom, epiphanies and inner lives hang in the balance.