Sublime

The poet accused cities of fostering a family of life-destroying emotions: anxiety about our position in the social hierarchy, envy at the success of others, pride and a desire to shine in the eyes of strangers.

unrealistic and homogeneous representation of space, time, and human preferences:

For Paris is, according to its legend, the city where everyone loses his head, and his morals, lives through at least one histoire d’amour, ceases, quite, to arrive anywhere on time, and thumbs his nose at the Puritans—the city, in brief, where all become drunken on the fine old air of freedom. This legend, in the fashion of legends, has this much

The creative-class thesis described me to a tee. And to some degree it always was going to. Countless cities had rebuilt themselves to attract people like me: a white, overeducated guy who wants to try the new slider place with a great tap selection.

The Left Bank is historically mesmerizing and sumptuous, but if you live on one side of Paris—say, on the Left or Right Bank—you rarely cross the river to visit the other side. Once you’re in a neighborhood, that’s where your life is. It helps to think of Paris as a collection of small villages bundled together, each one offering its own butchers,

Le philosophe du XXe siècle Walter Benjamin était captivé par l’idée du flâneur. Il écrivit une œuvre monumentale intitulée Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle - le livre des passages, qui est une anthologie de milliers de réflexions et d’aphorismes dont certains de sa plume. Il s’agit d’un classique de la flânerie. Le lecteur imagine facilement Benjami