The Aspiring Flâneur
Or, How I Decided to Stop Worrying and Share Some Travel Stories
Travel, for me, is magic.
A few months ago, my husband, Tibi, and I left Auckland, New Zealand, on a flight that left around 1 in the afternoon on a Sunday. We flew for almost 13 hours before arriving in Los Angeles on Sunday morning at 6 am…about 7 hours before we took off. Magic.
Skipping through time and the International Date Line aside, however, travel itself is a magical experience. The opportunity to visit new places and meet new people who encounter the world in a completely different way than you do is spellbinding. When I think about it, there is perhaps nothing that has had a bigger impact on the person I am and the way I view the world than the reality that my life has been marked, with increasing frequency, by the privelege of travel—repeatedly and compulsively picking myself up from one place and putting myself down in another.
Over the years, I’ve tried to find ways to share travel experiences with the people I love and the people they love without being a total bore. (At least, I hope so!) As most of my friends, family members, colleagues, or just random strangers I meet at a restaurant or bar will tell you, I eagerly pass along recommendations for restaurants or experiences when I discover someone is going somewhere I’ve been. Thirteen years ago, Tibi and I basically transformed our wedding into a carefully curated one-week trip for 98 of our closest friends to our favorite city in the world: Venice. Then we did it again for our five-year anniversary in Buenos Aires and for our twelve-year anniversary (our tenth was during lockdown) in San Miguel de Allende. A few years ago, Tibi and I created our own rating system for restaurants, then developed an amateur app using no coding at all and a build-it-yourself template so that we could keep track of the restaurants where we’ve eaten and how much we like them. More and more often, however, I find myself searching for other outlets not only to share my travel experiences with others, but to document them for my future self.
About seventeen-and-a-half years ago, in 2007, I took my first solo adult trip. I spent just over two weeks armed with a backpack, a Eurail pass, and a point-and-shoot camera traveling to Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam. I’m not exagerating when I say that this trip completely changed my life. As I explored these amazing cities, I kept a pocket-sized Moleskine journal with me at all times and I documented everything I saw and every experience I could remember whenever I sat down for a meal. I didn’t have a smartphone, much less an international data plan, so it was partly a strategy to make me seem occupied and less lonely—both to others and to myself—when I was seated alone at a restaurant. But today those journals are among my most prized possessions. When I read them, I can see and feel myself in those same places years ago. But more than that, I enjoy the recognition that comes from encountering a younger and (much) more naive version of myself…someone who is in the process of becoming the person I am now, rather than already that person.
I’ve journaled during a few other trips since then, but I’ve given up on the practice today, mostly because I now recognize that my compulsive need to document everything I experience can very easily lead to my not experiencing anything at all. But recently I’ve been inspired by my dear friend since high school, Brittany Felton, and her beautiful Substack, Yeah, I’d Hang Out With Her, to use this platform to share some of my experiences, past and present, as I’ve traveled.
I’m calling this Substack The Aspiring Flâneur because it describes me and the way I travel pretty well. If you Google “flâneur,” the definition that first pops up (on my screen, at least) is “an idler or lounger.” This is decidedly not what I mean when I use the term. Before that 2007 trip to Paris, my former teacher, Michael, encouraged me to read a book called The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Pardoxes of Paris by Edmund White. In this enchanting book, White borrows the term from the nineteenth century French writer Charles Baudelaire, who describes the flâneur as follows:
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. 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. […] 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.
The flâneur wanders through the city, absorbing it and all it offers. For Baudelaire, the flâneur is an objective observer that never involves himself (Baudelaire’s flâneur is decidedly a cisgender man, who is, let’s face it, also well-off and white) directly in the goings on he is observing. He intakes what surrounds him, but does not participate in it. For White, however, the predominant characteristic of the flâneur—the lesson he wants us to learn from the flâneur—is the total lack of planning. The flâneur does not map out the day with a schedule or a checklist of places to see and things to do. No, the flâneur strolls slowly through the city, looking for things that catch the eye, that entrance. When traveling, the flâneur reads no guide book, nor does he look up the top twenty sites on TripAdvisor. The flâneur just wanders and sees what strikes him.
When I read about the flâneur, the idea captivated me. It felt so right. It felt like the real way to travel and experience the world. Immediately upon reading White’s book, I wanted to be a flâneur.
And so, on that trip, I planned out exactly how I would be a flâneur. I would visit the sculpture garden at the Musée Rodin and, rather than staring at the sculptures, I would watch the people watching the sculptures. I would walk the banks of the Seine in the evening, being sure to amble by Notre Dame to see her flying buttresses awash in an amber glow. I would find a random gay bar in the Marais, where I would sit to have a drink and wait to see if anyone would talk to me. I had my life as a flâneur figured out exactly.
And so, you see the problem. I was absolutely taken with the romantacism of being a flâneur. But I couldn’t shake my compulsive need to plan out exactly how to be relaxed. And while I’ve gotten much better at this as the years go by, I would still say that I am only and will only ever be an aspiring flâneur.
With this collection of essays of indeterminate length, my plan is to document those aspirations, along with the stories and experiences I’ve had along the way. I’ll probably also look back at some of my old travel journals and revisit them through my 42-year-old eyes. Oh, and I’ll also provide some details of my favorite restaurants and meals I’ve had abroad because if there is one rule I will always follow, it is the precept that there is no greater sadness while traveling than a wasted meal.
Will anyone read this aside from Tibi and my mom? Who knows?! But here we go.
Tibi + mom + 1 🙋🏻♀️ !
Thanks for sharing this. I traveled as somewhat of a flâneur years ago through Southeast Asia, South Asia and Europe. Not making much plans and being open to suggestion and opportunity led me on much adventures that I may have missed otherwise. Of course, I needed to go back to some of the places again later to see the sites I missed. Both types of travel have their merit. Do what feels right at the time for where you are whenever possible.