In Paris a little while back I noticed the locals don’t walk around shops on a Sunday afternoon and buy stuff they don’t need. Hyper-consumerism is deemed vulgar. Instead, they walk the streets merely to . . . wander and ponder. They call it a flânerie—a wandering walk. I once found a secondhand book with the cover ripped off called The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, by Edmund White. To stroll in this way, White explained, is to be in real time with a city.
