. 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. Parisians might drop in for a coffee or an aperitif at cafés where the chairs face outward such that they can watch
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