Edmund White on The Flâneur

Edmund White's The Flâneur is a genial appreciation of the charms of strolling, lounging, sauntering around Paris, framed in a surprisingly somber obbligato:

Imagine dying and being grateful you'd gone to heaven, until one day (or one century) it dawned on you that your main mood was melancholy, although you were constantly convinced that happiness lay just around the next corner. That's something like living in Paris for years, even decades. It's a mild hell so comfortable that it resembles heaven. The French have such an attractive civilization, dedicated to calm pleasures and general tolerance, and their taste in every domain is so sharp, so sure, that the foreigner (especially someone from chaotic, confused America) is quickly seduced into believing that if he can only become a Parisian he will at last master the art of living. Paris intimidates its visitors when it doesn't infuriate them, but behind both sentiments dwells a sneaking suspicion that maybe the French have got it right, that they have located the juste milieu, and that their particular blend of artistic modishness and cultural conservatism, of welfare-statism and intense individualism, of clear-eyed realism and sappy romanticism--tht these proportions are wise, time-tested and as indisputable as they are subtle.

If so, then why is the flâneur so lonely? So sad? Why is there such an elegiac feeling hanging over this city with the gilded cupola gleaming a bove the Emperor's Tomb and the foaming, wild horses prancing out of a sea of verdigris on the roof of the Grand Palais? This city with the geometric tidiness of its glass pyramid, Arch of Triuumph and the chilly port imprinted by the Grande Arche on a cloudy sky? Why is he unhappy, this foreign flâneur even when he strolls past the barnacled towers of Nôtre-Dame soaring above the Seine and a steep wall so dense with ivy it looks like the side of a galleon sinking under moss-laden chains.

I've never actually lived in Paris (unless you count a six-week teachiang assignment). And much as I love to visit there, I don't think I've ever really wanted to live there--figuring I would never get beyond the famously impenetrable public face (I've read a lot of Simenon mysteries, so I know about the French and their secrets). Better to drink some good wine, eat some great cheese, and, yes, stroll and then go back to Palookaville.

Language wonk note: Yes, White spells "Nôtre-Dame" with a circumflex. This seems to me technically right, although I suspect that almost nobody does it.