Humor me for a moment and let me describe what my typical day this summer back in the Chicago suburbs (where I live) would look like.
It starts at around 9 or 10 AM when I’ve woken up without an alarm by the sheer power of sunlight. I get up on my own time, slowly making my way to the shower, and then get ready for the day ahead. What exactly I’m going to do today, I don’t know, but I know I will be leaving the house. My family, already awake and similarly aimless in their direction for the day, are ready to go, so we leave the house and walk. We’re not sure where we want to go, but we walk around knowing we want to be anywhere but home. On our walk, we pass through Starbucks and grab a coffee. We sit around for a bit, enjoying each other’s company while feeling the breeze of a well-earned Chicago summer. My stomach begins to growl at around 12 PM and I realize the only thing I’ve put in my stomach today is an iced coffee. We get up from our seats and go across the street to the local market, grabbing a semi-fresh baguette to take home. On the walk home, we give into the temptation that the smell of bread exudes, eating a third of the baguette before we’ve reached the front door of our house. After eating our midday brunch concoction, we get in the car to do pretty much the same thing in a new area. I enjoy this sense of aimlessness at home during the summer, as there’s not much that I need to get done, and it’s always a needed dose of quality time spent together.
A photo I took earlier this year of my mom and older brother at Starbucks. Can you tell I’m a little homesick?
A silly Tiktok I made in June exactly describes my wish to live “like a Parisian”.
This week, one of our assigned texts, The Flâneur by Edmund White, caught me by surprise as it seemed to describe my family’s silly pastime back home as a quintessential Parisian ideal. So much so in fact, that as I read it I laughed audibly to myself. I find it so funny that my family and I walk around our American, un-walkable suburb pretending we’re Parisians. I mean, how hilariously pathetic is that image?
I like poking fun at my family for how we make our American lives as “European” as we can and find it especially comical that as much as we try to get fresh bread, or sit in cute coffee shops, at the end of the day we are in America, and the best we’re gonna get is Starbucks and some semi-stale baguettes.
““The flâneur is in search of experience, not knowledge. Most experience ends up interpreted as – and replaced by – knowledge, but for the flâneur the experience remains somehow pure, useless, raw.” ”
In the text, White describes a flâneur as a Parisian who walks around with no goal in mind, taking in the sights and smells of Paris as they come.
So, with the spirit of a natural American flâneur, I’m making it a goal to experience Paris in this unique way. After each of our excursions, I’ve been exploring the area we end in as a flâneur. So much so, that my fellow bookpackers and I have dubbed the experience as “flâneur-ing”. It may be sacrilege to the Academie de Francais, but “flâneur-ing” has now become a verb among us bookpackers. For example, I’ll say to someone, “Do you wanna go flâneur-ing around a bit?” and they’ll know exactly what I mean.
After class on Thursday, Ian and I went “flâneur-ing” in the 6th arrondissement for a bit, and it’s been one of my favorite experiences in our travels so far. We simply went wherever our eyes took us, letting our curiosities take the front seat. We walked into some of the most eclectic boutiques I’ve ever seen— everything from trendy cashmere sweaters to jewelry stores to calligraphy shops hiding in every corner.
My fake definition for “flâneur-ing”
A Jewellery shop we found which was featured in the TV show Bridgerton!
We “flâneur-ed” exactly as Edmund White described, so much so that we even forgot to eat during the several hours we were exploring. The text references a “great literary flâneur” named Walter Benjamin. He says that “‘Frequently the flâneur is tired, having forgotten to eat despite the myriad cafes inviting him or her to come in, relax and partake of a drink or a snack: Like an ascetic animal he roams through unknown neighbourhoods until he collapses, totally exhausted, in the foreign, cold room that awaits him.’”
I can assure you that our stomachs were aching as we walked around— yet it didn’t matter to us. The chance of discovery and surprise at every corner was enough to keep us motivated beyond our natural instincts. The city of Paris can sometimes be too exciting to stop at a café!
For those who do sit and stop at cafés, though, it seems that wasting time is a non-issue. I think what has surprised me the most about Paris is just how much it is like everything it’s made out to be. You look at cafés and people are just sitting there—no laptops open, phones out—and I’m not even talking about technology—people aren’t even reading. They’re simply looking out at the street, taking in the world around them while conversing with whoever’s around. There’s an air of leisure here that is rare back home. As an American, it’s quite baffling.
I assume Parisians just know how to balance their work and their free time— giving each aspect of life its own moment to shine. I’d like to take that philosophy back to USC with me. In college, I’ve struggled with partitioning my time so that I can relax and get work done separately. I bring my homework with me everywhere, and it creates an atmosphere that makes work loom over me at all times. When I get back to USC, I’d like to set time away for leisure; a time where I can connect with others and the world around me— without having the stress of homework surrounding me at all times.
And in time, when I can’t remember my time in Paris as clearly, I can always think of my family— “flâneur-ing” around our suburb, living life like Parisians no matter where we are.