The Arcades Project - Operi

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precipitous. It leads downward-if not to the mythical Mothers, then into a past
that can be all the more profound because it is not his own, not private. Nevertheless,
it always remains the past of a youth. But why that of the life he has
lived? The ground over which he goes, the asphalt, is hollow. His steps awaken a
surprising resonance; the gaslight that streams down on the paving stones throws
an equivocal light on this double ground. The figure of the llaneur advances over
the street of stone, with its double ground, as though driven by a clockwork
lllechanism. And within, where tIns l11cchanism is ensconced, a Inusic box is
palpitating like some toy of long ago. It plays a tune: "From days of youth, /
from days of youth, / a song is with me still!' By this melody he recognizes what
is around h.iIn; it is not a past coming fronl his own youth, from a recent youth,
but a childhood lived before then tbat speaks to him, and it is all the same to him
whether it is the childhood of an ancestor or his own.-An intoxication comes
over the man who walks long and aimlessly through the streets. With each step,
the walk takes on greater momentum; ever weaker grow the temptations of
bistros, of shops, of smiling WOlllcn, ever luore irresistible the magnetism of the
next streetcorner, of a distant square in the fog, of the back of a woman walking
before him. Then comes hunger. He wants, however, nothing to do with the
myriad possibilities offered to sate his appetite, but like an animal he prowls
through unknown districts in search of food, in search of a woman, until, utterly
exhausted, he stumbles into his room, which receives him coldly and wears a
strange air. Paris created this type. VYhat is reularkable is that it wasn't Rome.
And the reason? Just this: does not dreaming itself take the high road in Rome?
And isn't that city too full of themes, of monuments, enclosed squares, national
shrines, to be able to enter tout entiere-with evety cobblestone, every shop sign,
every step, and every gateway-into the passerby's dream? The national character
of the Italians may also have much to do with this. For it is not the foreigners
but they themselves, the Parisians, who have made Paris the holy city of the
llneur-the "landscape built of sheer life;' as Hofmannsthal once put it. Landscape-that,
in fact, is what Paris becomes for the flmeur. Or, more precisely, the
city neatly splits for him into its dialectical poles: it opens up to him as a landscape,
even as it closes around hinl as a rOOlll.-Another tlllng: that anaIllnestic
intoxication in which the llaneur goes about the city not only feeds on the
sensory data taking shape before his eyes but can very well possess itself of
abstract knowledge-indeed, of dead facts-as something experienced and lived
through. This felt knowledge, as is obvious, travels above all by word of moutl1
from one person to another. But in the course of the nineteenth century, it was
also deposited in an immense literature. Even before Lefeuve (who quite aptly
made the following formula the title of his five-volume work), "Paris street by
street, house by house" was lovingly depicted as storied landscape forming a
backdrop to the dreaming idler. The study of these books was, for the Parisian,
like a second existence, one wholly predisposed toward dreaming; the knowledge
these books gave him took form and figure during an afternoon walk before the
aperitif. And wouldn't he necessarily have felt the gentle slope behind the church
of Notre Dame de Lorette rise all the more insistently under his soles if he