Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Nige and I ...

... already know this, of course: TO RAMBLE.

The greatest example of the attitude I am describing is the French flâneur.
Flâneur literally means stroller or idler, and, in the nineteenth
century, came to describe an elegant kind of gentlemanly moocher, who
ambled purposelessly through the Parisian arcades, watching, waiting,
hanging around. His hero was Baudelaire, as an anti-bourgeois who had
somehow freed himself from wage slavery and was at liberty to wander the
streets with no particular place to go.
I don't know about the mooching.

1 comment:

  1. Ah yes Frank - oh for the time to be a flaneur...

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