"I'm in the group of those who aspire to be dilettantes."
Duke Ellington
dilettante,
gadabout,
layabout,
flâneur,
amateur,
connoisseur,
dabbler,
dropout,
idler.
amateur : 1) a person who engages in a pursuit on an unpaid rather than a professional basis. 2) a person who is incompetent or inept at a particular activity. Late 18th century: from French, from Italian amatore, from Latin amator ‘lover’, from amare ‘to love’.
gadabout : a person who goes out a lot and does not worry about other things they should be doing; an habitual pleasure-seeker. "I'm quitting my job to go to gad school." Steven Gomez
flâneur : the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of “stroller”, “lounger”, “saunterer”, “loafer”—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means “to stroll”.
"The French poet Charles Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a 'gentleman stroller of city streets, and wrote that in the modern city we become a flâneur or stroller. This was an entirely new urban figure, associated with the era of modernity. According to Baudelaire, the flâneur moves through the labyrinthine streets and hidden spaces of the city, partaking of its attractions and fearful pleasures, but remaining somehow detached and apart from it. They aren’t walking to get something, or to go somewhere, they aren’t even shopping (which is as near as most of us get to this Baudelerian ideal). Flâneurs are standing in deliberate opposition to capitalist society, with its two great imperatives, to be in a hurry, and to buy things." lightgraphite
"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 flâneur, 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." Charles Baudelaire
"The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque'." Susan Sontag
"I have to walk to survive." Fred Herzog
Flaneur, Granville (1960)
Fred Herzog
