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Just as a gatherer may pause to note a tree whose acorns will be bountiful in six months or inspect a potential supply of basket canes, so an urban walker may note a grocery open late or a place to get shoes resoled, or detour by the post office.
Walking is only the beginning of citizenship, but through it the citizen knows his or her city and fellow citizens and truly inhabits the city rather than a small privatized part thereof.
The street means life in the heady currents of the urban river in which everyone and everything can mingle. It is exactly this social mobility, this lack of compartments and distinctions, that gives the street its danger and its magic, the danger and magic of water in which everything runs together.
only in the nineteenth century did places as clean, safe, and illuminated as modern cities begin to emerge.
The accounts of the time are full of the fears of the wealthy to go out at all and of young women lured or forced into sexual labor: prostitutes were everywhere. This is why Gay focuses on urban walking as an art—an art of protecting oneself from splashes, assaults, and indignities:
her fellow streetwalkers “think that women who work in whorehouses have too many restrictions and rules” while the street “welcomed everyone democratically. . . . They felt they were like cowboys out on the range, or spies on a dangerous mission. They bragged about how free they were. . . . They had no one to answer to but themselves.”
Streets were already a place for those who had no place, a site to measure sorrow and loneliness in the length of walks.
“Few of us understand the street,” Chesterton writes. “Even when we step into it, we step into it doubtfully, as into a house or room of strangers. Few of us see through the shining riddle of the street, the strange folk that belong to the street only—the street-walker or the street arab, the nomads who, generation after generation have kept their ancient secrets in the full blaze of the sun.
There is a subtle state most dedicated urban walkers know, a sort of basking in solitude—a dark solitude punctuated with encounters as the night sky is punctuated with stars.
In the city, one is alone because the world is made up of strangers, and to be a stranger surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently bearing one’s secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is among the starkest of luxuries.
In small doses melancholy, alienation, and introspection are among life’s most refined pleasures.
Cities make walking into true travel: danger, exile, discovery, transformation, wrap all around one’s home and come right up to the doorstep.
one can see the shift in country ballads: sometime in the 1950s disappointed lovers stopped walking away or catching the midnight train and began driving, and by the 1970s the apotheosis of eighteen-wheeler songs had arrived.
“The street” is a world where people in flight from the traumas that happen inside houses become natives of the outside.
Around the corner a guy was sitting in a doorway drinking and singing falsetto, with that knack some local drunks have for sounding like fallen angels.
Everything—houses, churches, bridges, walls—is the same sandy gray so that the city seems like a single construction of inconceivable complexity, a sort of coral reef of high culture. All this makes Paris seem porous, as though private thought and public acts were not so separate here as elsewhere, with walkers flowing in and out of reveries and revolutions.
The flâneur arose, Benjamin argues, at a period early in the nineteenth century when the city had become so large and complex that it was for the first time strange to its inhabitants.
“The flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them. If they had their way, progress would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this pace.”
Even before the French Revolution, some writers and walkers had cherished this idea of the city as a kind of wilderness, mysterious, dark, dangerous, and endlessly interesting.
“What are the dangers of the forest and the prairie compared with the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization?” wrote Baudelaire
Surrealism prized dreams, the free associations of an unconscious or unself-conscious mind, startling juxtapositions, chance and coincidence, and the poetic possibilities of everyday life. Wandering around a city was an ideal way to engage with all these qualities.
Parisian writers always gave the street address of their characters, as though all readers knew Paris so well that only a real location in the streets would breathe life into a character, as though histories and stories themselves had taken up residence throughout the city.
Cars had returned Paris’s streets to the dirty and dangerous state in which they once had been, in the days when Rousseau was run over by a coach and walking the streets was a feat.
De Certeau’s metaphor suggests a frightening possibility: that if the city is a language spoken by walkers, then a postpedestrian city not only has fallen silent but risks becoming a dead language, one whose colloquial phrases, jokes, and curses will vanish, even if its formal grammar survives.
Keeping the street and the city alive depends on understanding their grammar and generating the new utterances on which they thrive.
in dreary times joy itself is insurrectionary, as community is in times of isolation.
a procession is a participants’ journey, while a parade is a performance with audience.
It was as though in aligning our bodies we had somehow aligned our hearts.
The past becomes the foundation on which the future will be built, and those who honor no past may never make a future.
Such walking is a bodily demonstration of political or cultural conviction and one of the most universally available forms of public expression.
Only citizens familiar with their city as both symbolic and practical territory, able to come together on foot and accustomed to walking about their city, can revolt.
But when public spaces are eliminated, so ultimately is the public; the individual has ceased to be a citizen capable of experiencing and acting in common with fellow citizens.
Paris is the great city of walkers. And it is the great city of revolution. Those two facts are often written about as though they are unrelated, but they are vitally linked.
All the cities of revolution are old-fashioned cities: their stone and cement are soaked with meanings, with histories, with memories that make the city a theater in which every act echoes the past and makes a future, and power is still visible at the center of things.
Revolutions are always politics made bodily, politics when actions become the usual form of speech.
They carried branches as well as muskets—for muskets operate in the realm of the real, but branches in that of the symbolic.
even the everyday freedom to walk about had become criminalized (as, with curfews and bans on assembly, it often is in turbulent times or under repressive regimes).
A friend who was there told me it fell because so many people showed up when a false report circulated that the wall was down that they made it into a real event—the guards lost their nerve and let them through. It became true because enough people were there to make it true.
The city was being remade as a place whose center did not belong to business or to cars, but to pedestrians moving down the street in this most bodily form of free speech. The streets were no longer antechambers to the interiors of homes, schools, offices, shops, but a colossal amphitheater.
From the middle of the street, the sky is wider and the shop windows are opaque.
In living on the streets we were refusing to consume the meaning of that war and instead producing our own meaning, on our streets and in our hearts if not in our government and media.
At such times it is as though the still small pool of one’s own identity has been overrun by a great flood, bringing its own grand collective desires and resentments, scouring out that pool so thoroughly that one no longer feels fear or sees the reflections of oneself but is carried along on that insurrectionary surge.
It is the nature of revolutions to subside, which is not the same thing as to fail. A revolution is a lightning bolt showing us new possibilities and illuminating the darkness of our old arrangements so that we will never see them quite the same way again.
Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, talking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women’s sexuality.
There are three prerequisites to taking a walk—that is, to going out into the world to walk for pleasure. One must have free time, a place to go, and a body unhindered by illness or social restraints.
(Women’s clothes and bodily confinements—high heels, tight or fragile shoes, corsets and girdles, very full or narrow skirts, easily damaged fabrics, veils that obscure vision—are part of the social mores that have handicapped women as effectively as laws and fears.)
Of course women’s walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience, which means that they are asking for whatever attention they receive.
women’s sexuality is controlled via the regulation of public and private space.
Two-thirds of American women are afraid to walk alone in their own neighborhoods at night, according to one poll, and another reported that half of British women were afraid to go out after dark alone and 40 percent were “very worried” about being raped.
I realized that many women had been so successfully socialized to know their place that they had chosen more conservative, gregarious lives without realizing why. The very desire to walk alone had been extinguished in them—but it had not in me.
