On Becoming A Flâneur

Cath Johnsen explores the romantic French notion that you don't really know a city until you've been lost in it...

- Cath Johnsen

IT'S MID-MORNING ON a Monday, and I’m strolling along an inner-city street in Brisbane, with no particular destination in mind. Men and women stride past me, power-suited, heads bent over phones, hands clutching steaming takeaway coffees. As I near the end of the street, an old building with two wooden doors catches my attention, showing its age in a city that has demolished many of its original buildings in favour of newer, shinier, taller monoliths of concrete, steel and glass.

A sign above the entrance beckons me in with the promise of ‘one million books’ inside, and so I push through the heavy timber doors, away from the sounds of crawling cars and tradespeople wielding jackhammers, and into the cocoon of this musty -smelling, second-hand bookshop. Thousands of well-thumbed tomes reach from floor to ceiling along narrow aisles, with some only reachable by ladder, others locked away behind glass, but all the collective pages seeming right at home in this creaky floored, heritage-listed building.

I’m sure Charles Baudelaire would approve of this use of my time, the French poet who coined the idea of the flâneur—an idle, urban ambler who strolls the streets observing society, attentively soaking up the vignettes of metropolitan life. In fact, I may even be lucky enough to find some of Baudelaire’s writings in a place like this.

But while the original concept of the flâneur belongs to times past, the practice of flânerie is very much still in use today.

Tracey Zielinski, a clinical psychologist and author, says she regularly takes a leaf from the flâneur’s book, both when she’s at home and on holiday, but especially when she’s in the birthplace of the flâneur: Paris.