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“His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer, it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite.” – The Painter of Modern Life, Charles Baudelaire

The contemporary city is defined by its swiftness: from the rapidity at which new buildings can materialise to the rate at which a task in the workplace can be completed, the frantic networks of transportation are always calculating the fastest route from A to B. Underneath the skyscrapers’ scrutinising gaze, passively sitting and observing the hurried ebb and flow of the metropolis has become a strictly rationed luxury. It is much too tempting to be washed away with the flow of a hurried crowd – after all, it’s only natural to follow the herd.

On the budding streets of nineteenth-century Paris, Charles Baudelaire began to take note of a singular man emerging from the cracks of the city’s freshly- layed bricks. This figure was not just a spectator and a witness, but also a reporter of the aesthetics of the arrondissements, detailing both the pleasing and sickening features of this modern lifestyle. Much of Baudelaire’s writing found this figure at it’s centre, framing such observations through the intense prose poetry which infects his collection ‘Flowers of Evil’. He christened this new being the ‘flâneur’, a word which directly translates as meaning ‘stroller’ or ‘loafer’. One who wanders aimlessly, a ‘connoisseur of the streets’.

For Baudelaire, the ‘flâneur’ was a man in search of transcendence, aligned with a goal to to ‘derive the eternal from the ephemeral’, finding ‘the poetic in the historic’. He believed that by finding beauty in details which are often overlooked, by appreciating the world as it is presented, the ‘flâneur’ then possesses the spiritual ability to be away from his house and feel at home anywhere. We are too quick to romanticise times which have passed, but often the people who existed in those times forgot to savour them. He believed we must first extract the mysterious beauty from the present before we can look backwards.

However unnatural it might feel, I urge you to take that first step back from the crowd – I think you’ll find yourself feeling more oceanic than you did blindly sailing through the streets. In a world defined by swiftness and schedule, allow yourself the pleasure of walking at your own pace for once, however aimlessly you might be wandering. Whether you’re a tourist in a new city or a stroller in a familiar one, there is always some new, exciting detail to be discovered. So get your battered loafers on and start walking, there’s a world outside waiting for you.