The Arcades Project - Operi

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often, idleness is the very thing which stamps that production with the traits that
make its relation to the economic production process so drastic. [m4a,4]
The student "never stops learning"; the gambler "never has enough"; for the
flaneur, "there is always something more to see," Idleness has in view an unlimited
duration, which fundamentally distinguishes it from simple sensuous pleasure,
of whatever variety. (Is it correct to say that the "bad infinity" that prevails in
idleness appears in Hegel as the signature of bourgeois society?) [m5, 1]
The spontaneity common to the student, to the gambler, to the flaneur is perhaps
that of the hunter-which is to say, that of the oldest type of work, which may be
intertwined closest of all with idleness. [m5,2]
Flaubert's "Few will suspect how depressed one had to be to undertake the
revival of Carthage" makes the connection between study and melencolia
transparent. (The latter no doubt threatens not only this form of leisure but all
forms of idleness.) Compare "My soul is sad and I have read all the books"
(Mallarme) ; "Spleen II" and "La Voix" (Baudelaire) ; "Here stand I, alas, Philosophy
/ behind me" (Goethe)Y [m5,3]
Again and again in Baudelaire, the specifically modem is there to be recognized
as complement of the specifically archaic. In the person of the flaneur, whose
idleness carries him through an imaginary city of arcades, the poet is confronted
by the dandy (who weaves his way through the crowd without taking notice of
the jolts to which he is exposed) . Yet also in the flaneur a long-extinct creature
opens a dreamy eye, casts a look that goes to the heart of the poet. It is the "son
of the wildemess"-the man who, once upon a time, was betrothed, by a generous
nature, to leisure. Dandyism is the last glinuner of the heroic in times of
decadence. Baudelaire is delighted to find in Chateaubriand a reference to American
Indian dandies-testimony to the fonner golden age of these tribes. [m5,4]
On the hunter type in the Hauenr: '"The mass of tenants and lodgers begins to stray
from shelter to shelter in this sea of houses, like the hunters and shepherds of
prehistory. The intellectual education of the nomad is now complete." Oswald
Spengler, Le Declin de l'Occident < trans. M. Tazerout>, vol. 2, part 1 (Paris ,
(933), p. 140.'" [m5,5]
"Man as civilized heing, as intellectual nomad, is again wholly microcosmic,
wholly homeless, as free intellectually as hunter and herdsman were free sensu­
ally." Spengler, vol. 2, p. 125.15 [mS,G]