Food for thought aka quote of the day from Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton - A good idea from... Baudelaire
FOR PEOPLE who think of city streets as nightmarish environments of
noise and litter (and for whom happiness would be a cottage in the
hills), Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) may be the perfect guide to one
particular charm of urban life.
In his prose and poetry of the
1850s and 60s, Baudelaire described walking down city streets as one of
the most exciting adventures open to mankind; far more dramatic than any
play, far richer in ideas than any book. And he settled on a word to
capture the attitude he felt one should adopt when walking along the
streets. One should become, he suggested, a flaneur, translated
literally as a stroller or saunterer, though Baudelerians usually keep
it in the original.
So what
distinguishes flaneurs from ordinary people on their way to work?
Perhaps their defining characteristic is that they don't have any
practical goals in mind. Flaneurs aren't walking to get something, or to
go somewhere; they aren't even shopping (which is as near as most of us
get to this Baudelerian ideal). Flaneurs are standing in deliberate
opposition to capitalist society, with its two great imperatives: to be
in a hurry, and to buy things. (As a protest against the former, there
was in Paris a brief vogue for flaneurs to amble around town with
tortoises on leashes.)
What the flaneurs are doing is looking. They are opening their eyes and ears
to the scene around them. They are not treating the street as an
obstacle course to be negotiated; they are opening themselves up to it.
They are wondering about the lives of those they pass, constructing
narratives for them, they are eavesdropping on conversations, they are
studying how people dress and what new shops and products there are (not
in order to buy anything - just in order to reflect on them as
important pieces of evidence of what human beings are about). The
flaneurs are avid enthusiasts of what Baudelaire called "the modern".
Unlike so many of Baudelaire's highbrow contemporaries, flaneurs aren't
just interested in the beauty of classical objects of art, they relish
what is up-to-date, they love the trendy.
While cities bring
together huge numbers of people, paradoxically they also separate them
from each other. The goal of flaneurs is to recover a sense of
community, as Baudelaire put it, "to be away from home and yet to feel
everywhere at home". To do this, they let down their guard, they
empathise with situations they see. There's a constant risk they will be
moved, saddened, excited - and fall in love.
Baudelaire's " une
passante" in Les fleurs du mal is one of the finest poems on the
mini-crushes one can - as a flaneur - have in city streets: a man walks
past a beautiful woman in a crowded thoroughfare. He sees her for only a
few seconds, she smiles at him, and he is filled with longing and a
sense of what might have been. The poem ends with the sigh "O toi que
j'eusse aimee": "you whom I might have loved".
How to become a flaneur: 1) Read Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris and his art criticism; 2) buy a turtle.
Unquote
So the idea is to stroll idly doing nothing, looking, feeling and experiencing in a hands-off way, while frustrating capitalism by i) refusing to work or otherwise contribute to Capitalist society, ii) refusing to spend in general and especially refusing to buy Capitalist goods....
But I seem to have a better idea... let's just develop the concept logically and bump ourselves off because that seems to be the only way you can escape the fate of a Capitalist slave to the 1% percent of Capitalist crooks.
