“Walking helps me feel at home. »
Posted at 11:30 a.m.
I traced a heart in the margin of the book, then let my gaze wander out the window of the train. What a great coincidence to start reading an essay that encapsulates my relationship to travel so well by traveling between Seattle and Portland…
This summer, my lover and I visited these two metropolises and Vancouver. We traveled on planes, trains, buses, subways and bicycles. We even took a monorail. But, above all, we walked 200 km in two weeks.
It is on foot that we prefer to discover the world.
What better way to tame a city than by immersing yourself in its smells and sounds? What about meeting the gaze of its inhabitants? His graffiti? The slow pace calls for immersion.
If we cover less ground than on an electric scooter (a big favorite of the West Coast, according to my observations), we absorb more of our surroundings.
Lauren Elkin, author of the essay Flâneuse — Reconquer the city step by stepalso writes that walking is somewhat similar to reading: you can hear other people’s conversations, you tell yourself stories, you always have company…
“You walk through the city alongside the living and the dead. »
That’s another sentence that has earned a heart in the margin.
For the essayist, walking the streets is first and foremost going where others have lived. It is therefore to witness what the great revolutions, the slightest dramas and the simple daily life have made of a district.
It may even be, who knows, feel a shiver while unknowingly passing in front of the house that once housed an ancestor…
* * *
In Loafer, Lauren Elkin tells what the streets of Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London revealed to her. At the same time, she traces the path of illustrious walkers who were able to use what they saw to portray the world differently. Strollers like the artists Sophie Calle and Agnès Varda, the writers Virginia Woolf and George Sand or even the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn.
Loafers. The term is not trivial! We know much more about its male equivalent… The flâneur became a popular figure in the 19th century.e century. It designates a man who has the leisure to wander in the city, to stop in the cafes and to observe people. For some, he likes to do nothing. For others, he has the luxury of time.
But who is the stroller? What place do the streets give to women who want to see more than be watched?
This is the question that Lauren Elkin tries to answer by juxtaposing her own experiences with those of artists who have understood their era one step at a time. Women who have tasted the pleasure of what Virginia Woolf called “street haunting” – the act of diving into the heads of passers-by.
Reading about these flâneuses makes you want to put on your sneakers and set off to discover a new city. Better, it makes you want to go home and revisit the city you think you know.
I certainly did not walk all the streets of Montreal. Its alleys, their families and their cats still hold many secrets for me. I have for decades to be a tourist at home! And once I have toured my beloved metropolis, it will have had time to change a hundred times…
Anyone who has known New York before and after September 11, 2001 or Paris before and after the attacks of November 13, 2015 knows that the streets of a city can change overnight, as Lauren Elkin explains.
* * *
I drew a third heart in the book.
“Walking is mapping with your feet. »
According to the essayist, it is by walking that one connects neighborhoods which, otherwise, would remain small independent planets. It is on foot that one can feel the changes of atmosphere within the same city; a theory dear to psychogeography.
For Guy Debord and other situationists, psychogeography makes it possible to study how the geographical environment acts on the emotions and behavior of individuals. To identify the states of mind of citizens according to the urban space, you have to walk the streets and report what you hear, see, smell or feel.
Lauren Elkin points out that psychogeography has earned its fair share of criticism over time (some call it the “brotherhood of men in gore-tex”), but she still notes a procedure that I really like.
Drop a glass on the map of a city, then trace the outline of said glass in pencil. This is the path you should try to walk as faithfully as possible. And don’t forget to document your findings, on the go!
Without trying to map the moods of our fellow citizens, here is a great idea to walk consciously. To take advantage of what the streets have to teach us about others, as well as about ourselves…
Provided we are allowed to survey them in safety, of course.
If we have come a long way since the years when George Sand dressed as a man to stroll quietly, the fact remains that some people are discriminated against because of their gender, culture, orientation or skin as soon as they invest the space. audience.
Whose street? Really not for everyone.
But I won’t dwell too much on that. In fact, yes, but in my column tomorrow…
For now, I just want to let Lauren Elkin inspire us to travel slow. Walk. Elsewhere or at home.