Get Lost!

Embracing The Way of the Flâneur

I was in London recently, where I did something radical: I got lost. On purpose. One morning, I stepped out of my hotel in Bloomsbury and headed to….to where? I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I tucked my smartphone into my rucksack, vowing not to consult it no matter how disoriented, and simply walked.

And walked. I must have logged seven miles, none of them linear. If a street or alleyway piqued my interest, I detoured there. If not, I kept going.

At first, my aimlessness was disconcerting—where am I?—but I soon embraced it. To walk without a destination or expectation is wonderfully liberating.

Consciously or not, I was following a centuries-old tradition: I was a flâneur. The word comes from the French verb flâner, meaning to stroll and, reaching further back, from the Old Norse flana, “to wander with no purpose.”

The concept, if not the name, was born in the same city I found myself in, London, and by a fellow American: Edgar Allan Poe. In his 1840 short story “The Man of the Crowd,” Poe conjured an unnamed narrator sitting in an unnamed coffee shop in London, watching the passing throngs and taking pity on them, for they seemed so lonely despite "the very denseness of the company around."

A few decades later, the French writer Charles Baudelaire gave name and expanded form to Poe’s man of the crowd. The flâneur, Baudelaire wrote, doesn’t pity or fear the crowd but, rather, is energized by it, diving into it “as though into an enormous reservoir of electricity.” Baudelaire elaborates:

The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. 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. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.”

I confess: this sounds awfully appealing, but what exactly is a flâneur and what distinguishes her from an “ordinary’ pedestrian?

For starters, the flâneur walks without a destination. He is, by definition, going nowhere very slowly. Speed is his enemy. One possibly apocryphal account tells of how the flâneurs of 19th century Paris would stroll the city’s arcades while walking a turtle on a leash. They let the reptile set the pace.

Depiction of a 19th-century Parisian walking a turtle, forcing himself to slow down.

Time is the flâneur's friend. Otherwise, he is companionless. He walks alone. Always. To speak of a pack of flâneurs, or even a pair, is to utter nonsense. There is no such thing. Traveling in a group insulates us from our surroundings, anesthetizing us to the sounds and smells around us.

The flâneur does more than observe the city. He reads it. He imbibes it, and with his entire being. Wandering the city, indulging in what Balzac called, “a gastronomy of the eye,” the flâneur sees what others overlook. He also smells and feels and tastes what eludes others. His senses are wide open.

The flâneur is part of the crowd he observes but stands apart from it too. He is disinterested but not uninterested in his surroundings. The key is expectations. The flâneur has none, knowing that nothing ruins an authentic experience more quickly and thoroughly than an expectation.

The countryside has its charms but the true flâneur is a creature of the city. Anyone can get lost in a forest, said the philosopher Walter Benjamin, “but to lose one’s way in the city…requires some schooling.”

That got me thinking. We have schools, certainly seminars and the like, to help people find their way in the world. Why not a school that teaches the fine art of getting lost? (I can picture the billboard: “If you attended this school, you’d be lost by now.” ) That skill is equally important, arguably more so. “Never to get lost is not to live,” proclaims Rebecca Solnit in her delightfully quirky book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. The well-worn path is a dead end.

There is something rebellious, subversive even, about being a flâneur. With each aimless step, you are thumbing your nose—or your big toe, perhaps—at social norms. Society doesn’t know what to do with the wayward pedestrian. Their aimlessness makes us uncomfortable. Authoritarian regimes, wary of idleness, often ban loitering.

The modern flâneur rebels against the tyranny of the algorithm and the numbing efficiency of GPS. The true flâneur is not interested in the quickest way from A to B. He cares not one whit for estimated arrival times, and is constantly rerouting himself.

You need not travel to the Himalayas or Antarctica to experience the joys of getting lost. Henry David Thoreau spent virtually his entire life within a five-mile radius of his home in Concord, Massachusetts, yet he still got lost on a regular basis. “Not till we are completely lost, or turned around…do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature,” he wrote in Walden.

The true flâneur may grow tired but never bored. There are no boring cities, only boring wanderers or, as Baudelaire puts it more bluntly, “Any man who is bored in the midst of the crowd, is a fool! A fool! and I despise him!”

Our culture does not exactly encourage this sort of aimlessness. The best route, we’re told, is the fastest, as anyone who has been rerouted by Google Maps because it “found a way to save you two minutes” knows. We pay lip service, no more, to the scenic route, and have no patience for the long way home. When it comes to careers, we take pity on those poor “lost souls” pursuing their “lost causes” because surely they have “lost their way.”

Yet history is rarely made by those who follow straight lines. It is made by those who meander, by the disoriented and the confused. In the nineth-century, the Viking explorer Naddodd was sailing from Norway to the Faroe Islands when a ferocious storm blew his ship off course and into the frigid North Atlantic waters. Days later, he spotted a massive, uninhabited landmass. He had just discovered Iceland.

In 1946, a young Bedouin shepherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib was tending a flock of sheep and goats along the northwest shore of the Dead Sea when one of his goats wandered into the steep, crumbling limestone cliffs. Chasing the stray animal, he spotted a small opening to a cave. Suspecting his goat had hidden inside, he threw a rock into the dark crevice but instead of a bleat, he heard the distinctive, unexpected sound of shattering pottery. Climbing inside, he found several tall clay jars. He had just discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I did not discover new landmasses or ancient scripture on my London walkabout, but I did stumble across a few nuggets of frisson that I would have otherwise missed had I had my head stuck up my GPS. I would have missed Watkins, the eccentric bookstore featuring titles on magic and the occult and looking exactly something out of Harry Potter. I would have missed the pickup game of soccer that broke out along The Strand, and I would have missed the buskers performing so brilliantly in Covent Garden.

Only when you are willing to get well and truly lost on a regular basis do you experience the wonders of serendipity. Only then do you become a full collaborator with chance. Another term for “lost” is “open to new possibilities.”

So, the next time someone tells you to “Get lost!” remain calm and reply simply, “Thank you. What a wonderful suggestion!”