> > > To me the gain in sociability from use in public transport is
>> > clear. I ride the New York City Transit Authority daily.
>
>Jordan Hayes:
>> Speaking as an ex-New Yorker, the dirty little secret of NYC is that,
>> despite what everyone tells you, the subway, except for the extreme
>> peak rush hour, is not the best way to get around town; taxis are. And
>> as soon as you can afford it, you take taxis more than the subway.
>
>The fastest way to get around is by bicycle. However, this
>requires a strong butt (because the city government does not
>believe in smooth pavements, for some reason) and a certain
>taste for terror.
Why should we want to get around _fast_, though? Unless one is driving an ambulance, that is. What we need most of the times is _reliable_ transportation, not the fastest possible one.
***** The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. 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 -- such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, 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. He is an 'I' with an insatiable appetite for the 'non-I', at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive. 'Any man,' he said one day, in the course of one of those conversations which he illuminates with burning glance and evocative gesture, 'any man who is not crushed by one of those griefs whose nature is too real not to monopolize all his capacities, and who can yet be _bored in the heart of the multitude_, is a blockhead! a blockhead! and I despise him!'
...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 know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind.
(Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," _The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays_, trans. Jonathan Mayne, New York: Da Capo Press, 1964, pp. 9-12 [originally published in the Parisian newspaper Figaro in 1863]) *****
Yoshie