Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

[Dave Monroe]

... from The Painter of Modern Life, by Charles Baudelaire (trans. and
ed. Jonathan Mayne, London: Phaidon, 1964 and New York: Da Capo, 1964
[1863]):

The crowd is his element ....  His passion and his profession are to
become one flesh with the crowd.  For the perfect flaneur, for the
passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart
of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the
fugitive and the infinite.  To be away from home and yet to feel oneself
everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world,
and yet to remain hidden from the world--impartial natures which the
tongue can but clumsily define.  The spectator is a prince who
everywhere rejoices in his incognito.  The lover of life makes the whole
world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his
family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are
or are not to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical
society of dreams painted on canvas.  Thus the lover of universal life
enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of
electrical energy.  Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the
crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding
to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life
and the flickering grace of all  the elements of life.... any man who
can yet be bored in the heart of the multitude is blockhead! a
blockhead! and I despise him! (9-10)

... and so away he goes, hurrying, searching.  But searching for what?
Be very sure that this man, such as I have depicted him--this solitary,
gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the
great human desert--has an aim loftier than that of a mere flaneur, an
aim more general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of
circumstance.  He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to
call "modernity"; for I now of no better word to express the idea I have
in mind.
He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may
contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from the
transitory.  Casting an eye over our exhibitions of modern pictures, we
are struck by a general tendency among artists to dress all their
subjects in the garments of the past.... By ‘modernity’ I mean the
ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other
half is the eternal and the immutable. (12)

... handily (esp. for my aching hands) online @

http://www.arts.usf.edu/~marcus/hop/flaneur.html

... and from Thomas Pynchon, V. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1986
[1961]) ...

Christmas Eve, 1955, benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket,
and big cowboy hat, ahppend to pass through Norfolk, Virginia.  Given to
sentimental impulses, he thjought he'd look in on the Sailor's Grave,
his old tin can's tavern on East Main Street.  He got there by way of
the Arcade ... (1)

Since his discharge from the Navy Profane had been road-laboring and
when there wasn't work just traveling, up and down the east coast like a
yo-yo; and this had been going on for maybe a year and a half.  After
that long of more name pavements that he'd care to count, Profane had
grown a little leery of streets, especially streets like this.  They had
in fact all fused into a single abstracted Street ... (2)

... Benny Profane as parodic flaneur?  See as well, of course, Walter
Benjamin's Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High
Capitalism (which I belive Verso is finally putting back into print),
"Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" in Illuminations, and the
recently translated The Arcades Project.  Louis Aragon's Paris Peasant
might be of interest, use as well.  Note that modernist "man in black"
as well, see John Harvey, Men in Black.  And I had hopes that "benet"
might yield some sort of flower in French (hence Benny Profane = le
fleur du mal), but, alas, it only seems to mean "idiot" or "simpleton"
... hey, wait a minute ...