To embellish an otherwise dull world, I paint my life with literary and philosophical constructs — those created to impose order upon generally chaotic disciplines. Rather than seeing life solely through disconnected tableaus, I create a map of the world populated with artistic glamor and intrigue. The construct which has most thoroughly ornamented my current college experience is that of the flâneur. The flâneur, for those unfamiliar, is a kind of idler. He, and he is usually a “he” in Victorian literature, uses the proximity and anonymity of the crowd to closely observe and analyze people and society. He discovers the city and those who inhabit it through his imaginative lens and creates artful stories about who they are, what they believe, and what they symbolize in the world. All the while, he benefits from a non-identity, one which people can easily overlook for its baseness.
When deciding to attend Swarthmore College, I divined that I would likely be far from the most interesting individual at the college. Inconspicuously placed among a coterie of regional princes, children of Ivy league professors, and a litany of individuals from the oh-so-romantic Bay Area, my identity would not strike anyone as profoundly unique. For this reason, however, I have been able to adopt the mantle of campus flâneur. With my group of far more interesting, more attention-provoking friends, I am able to look at the world from an indiscernible locus.
My aforementioned coterie of peers contain within them an artful multitude, and one which allows my imagination to billow with possibilities. Rather than immediately categorizing my fellow Willets resident as “just another tennis player” — seeing him return with his racket in hand — I construct for him a dense and illustrious narrative. I imagine his path to Swarthmore today, seeing a winding road with many perilous ridges but an equal number of serene pastures. I indulge myself with the image of him as the hometown hero, working equally as hard in the classroom as on the court. My mind abounds with images of him helping his community, helping with the local soup kitchen, and working with young children.
My loneliest and most artful subject is the one whom I have only understood as “Professor.” I suppose it is because I see within him those aspects of myself that I least wish to face. This Professor character is a fellow first-year student who carries himself with general couth and who adorns himself in the habiliments of an English Professor. Within Professor, I see a profound and looming loneliness. For days on end, I’d make note of his entrance into Sharples, nearly always by himself, always in his characteristic garb. Rather than painting, I fell (much like Alice in the Looking Glass) into the portrait of his life. I found myself in a small, suburban home in a small town in Massachusetts. My chamber was inhabited only by tomes of Wilde, Poe, and Woolf — when I picked up a copy of one, I noted thorough annotations. For some reason, it was always raining. It was either that or the noise of my thoughts, but I never could note a discernible difference between the two.
Being a flâneur is an emotionally dangerous and physically strenuous task in the modern day. Back in the time of Baudelaire and Poe, the trope’s founders, adopting a blasé attitude and using only one’s surface level preconceptions and biases to create narratives sufficed. A “protective organ” was necessary to prevent over-attachment and genuine connection. In the contemporary world, however, we are too aware of the context of our peers’ lives to boil another human being down to only their illusory qualities.
For the philosophy of a twenty-first century flâneur, I turn to the work of Hozier to illuminate their nature. In his song “Someone New,” Hozier portrays the philosophy of the modern flâneur in his clever diction. The idea that Hozier “elect[s] strange perfections, in any stranger [he] choose[s]” and then “fall[s] in love just a little, oh, a little bit / every day with someone new” perfectly demonstrates the momentary glance into another’s life, and the resplendent quality one finds in their fellow. The modern flâneur carries an immense interest in their peers, not just in a simplified and prejudicial sense, but in a personal and communal understanding. Rather than love being a fundamentally limited affair, the flâneur sees love in every soul who passes by to get coffee at Kohlberg, who passes them while studying in McCabe, and who they make eye contact with in the Dining Community Commons.
Adopting the mantle of campus flâneur means having to redefine the term for the modern day. For when it was created, it represented the patriarchy of the modern city personified. The notion of seeing and not being seen was essential to a blasé, white, male, middle class, one who maintained certain preconceptions about the world which didn’t reflect honest knowledge of its fellows. In the contemporary world, however, the flâneur must adopt new meaning, especially on such a diverse campus as Swarthmore. Rather than understanding one’s peers only through eternal and invariable narratives, the modern flâneur constructs three-dimensional essences of their peers through study of each action and their individual nature. They take in others’ experiences and life stories as personal gifts, and take that little sight which has been bestowed upon them to construct narratives of brilliance and light rather than of cold calculations. In this way, we should all hope to maintain the notion of the flâneur. Not as cold, calculating scientists, but as romantic poets, always seeking beauty in the lives of our peers.
