Flâneur
Metadata
Highlights
- 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”.[5][6] Anaïs Bazin wrote that “the only, the true sovereign of Paris is the flâneur“.[5] 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 (View Highlight)
- 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 centre 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. (View Highlight)
title: “Flâneur”
author: “wikipedia.org”
url: ”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur”
date: 2023-12-19
source: reader
tags: media/articles
Flâneur
Metadata
Highlights
- 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”.[5][6] Anaïs Bazin wrote that “the only, the true sovereign of Paris is the flâneur“.[5] 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 (View Highlight)
- 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 centre 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. (View Highlight)