Not all those who wander are lost

Staying in a hostel is like being at summer camp. I am at a hostel in Lyon, in a room of six beds. One of the roommates is almost always in the room. Now, at 5 in the afternoon, he is taking a nap in his clothes with socks on. I can see the imprint the soles of his feet made walking on the bottom of his socks, and I can smell them. The guy who made me lunch today confessed that, when travelling, he doesn’t change his underwear every day. The staff at the hostel are having their own great time: they hang out here because it’s where their friends and family are. There’s a bar, a patio, a kitchen, music, drinks, fun. The place is called Flâneur, which might mean “wanderer,” from the verb flâner, meaning “stroll aimlessly and without haste.” It’s difficult to give a precise translation, but Baudelaire summed it up well in his essay on Le peintre de la vie moderne:

La foule est son domaine, comme l’air est celui de l’oiseau, comme l’eau celui du poisson. Sa passion et sa profession, c’est d’épouser la foule. Pour le parfait flâneur, pour l’observateur passionné, c’est une immense jouissance que d’élire domicile dans le nombre, dans l’ondoyant dans le mouvement, dans le fugitif et l’infini. Etre hors de chez soi, et pourtant se sentir partout chez soi; voir le monde, être au centre du monde et rester caché au monde, tels sont quelques-uns des moindres plaisirs de ces esprits indépendants, passionnés, impartiaux, que la langue ne peut que maladroitement définir. L’observateur est un prince qui jouit partout de son incognito. L’amateur de la vie fait du monde sa famille, comme l’amateur du beau sexe compose sa famille de toutes les beautés trouvées, trouvables et introuvables; comme l’amateur de tableaux vit dans une société enchantée de rêves peints sur toile. Ainsi l’amoureux de la vie universelle entre dans la foule comme dans un immense réservoir d’électricité. On peut aussi le comparer, lui, à un miroir aussi immense que cette foule; à un kaléidoscope doué de conscience, qui, à chacun de ses mouvements, représente la vie multiple et la grâce mouvante de tous les éléments de la vie. C’est un moi insatiable du non-moi, qui, à chaque instant, le rend et l’exprime en images plus vivantes que la vie elle-même, toujours instable et fugitive.

If I may dare to translate the poet’s words (and indeed, whom else would I trust, especially without an odious license?):

The crowd is his domain, as the air is the bird’s, as the water the fish’s. His passion and his profession is to embrace the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the impassioned observer, it is a tremendous joy to elect life in the multitude, in the undulating in motion, in the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and nevertheless feel at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and to stay hidden from the world; these are some of least pleasures of those independant, passionate, and impartial spirits whom language can only awkwardly describe. The observer is a prince who everywhere enjoys his privacy. The lover of life makes the world his family, as the lover of the fairer sex makes his family from all the beauties found, findable, and unfindable; as the lover of pictures lives in an enchanted society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as into an immense resevoir of electricity. We can also compare him to a mirror as immense as that crowd; to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness that, in each of its movements, represents the multiple life and the moving grace of all the elements of life. [The flâneur​] is a me fed by the not-me, which they render and express, in each moment, by images more alive than life itself, always unstable and fugitive.

Translation is hard: traduttore, traditore. French and English are so different, and Baudelaire’s style is inimitable. The languages have changed between now and then, as have expectations and methods. A piece of this passage (in French) is stenciled on the wall of the hostel. When I arrived and saw the text, I pointed it out to the receptionist: “voilà Baudelaire!” The receptionist didn’t even notice what I was pointing at. But I think that I have captured, in a translation which is necessarily also a rewriting, something of the spirit of the words.

At a hostel we form friendships sudden and intense, but always unstable and fugitive. Today I called without warning an Iranian quantum computing researcher I met at a hostel in Naples because two Persian-speakers were checking into the hostel here and we needed a live translation; he was charitable enough to pick up and help out. I hadn’t spoken to him since we parted in Naples more than a month ago, and he was good enough to chat. Fugitive, unstable, but not unreal: we’re human beings who made brief contact, but now we each know that the other exists.

“I’ll write every day!” and we never do. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t know the people after we part. Over the last couple months I’ve been exchanging emails with a Swedish computer science student I met in Rome; he emailed the email address I have on this blog, which is (if you’re wondering) the best way to contact me. We’ve been corresponding with some regularity since then; the advantage of email is that one can take some time to respond at length, without the expectation that a response will be instantaneous. He’s begun a blog at kyq.se, which I recommend checking out once he gets posts up and running (though unless you read Swedish, you’ll have to get it in translation!).

Disappointingly, I don’t have a satisfying conclusion for this post: it’s just a few observations on a theme. I’ve been feeling lately as though, on the one hand, I am beginning to understand things, and on the other hand that I am undertaking a project too ambitious for me. I feel somehow pressed against the limitations of my own immaturity: if this is how I think now, who knows what I’ll think in a year? Or worse, suppose that I already understand as much as I’ll ever understand? Terrifying stuff. Lyon is hot and my Chilean friend and I made chilaquiles—delicious. I’m very happy here.