August Flânerie

Like the impressionists, we see a magical sense of ambiance in cities that never sleep; places where we don’t have to pick between living as morning larks or night owls, a place where dawn-to-dusk and dusk-to-dawn can flourish simultaneously and cross pollinate; where the vice of darkness and virtue of mornings can be experienced in equal amounts.

After all, cities are where people are supposed to have serendipitous encounters—as the writer and critic Jane Jacobs said, “The metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.” By comparison, the cliché goes, people become more atomized the farther they move from urban environments into the clinical, safe,... See more

When we treat it as axiomatic that small towns have no use or place for such people, that if you have ever liked a French movie you had better just hurry to the nearest city, we forget that part of being a community is leaving room for the diversity of human nature.

As Mireille Silcoff noted in a piece exploring how real life subcultures have been reduced to online aesthetic trends: ‘youth culture’ comes alive when the sun goes down, and by stopping young people from hanging out in cities at night, they’re ultimately cutting off the lifeblood of these scenes: “ the youth belong at the rave, at the block party,... See more

metimes the community you need might be just one other person! I’ve always loved the story of Flaubert writing Madame Bovary. Here was the ultimate solitary genius, working alone in his study at night, creeping forward on his novel at an excruciatingly slow pace—that’s one of part of how he got it done. But the other part is that every Sunday his f... See more

We can have sympathy for the dandies. To live, as many of them did, in a rapidly changing, ever-industrializing Paris, where alleyways and artisans were constantly being supplanted by grands boulevards and department stores, must have been disorienting; the ease of technological reproduction at once dazzling and destabilizing. A whole host of liter... See more

The city is a metaphor for home; just as we remove shoes to enter the sacred space of home, we remove our carapace to enter the sacred, enchanting, convivial space of our city home. Streets are now truly public spaces that support high concentrations of life– forests, gardens, and play space, and people move around primarily by foot renewable-energ... See more

This is what Camus meant when he said that "what gives value to travel is fear" -- disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish... See more