There's a running joke in my family about walking. It was born out of my sister's asking my mother how she was getting somewhere. Car? Taxi? Subway? Bus? "No. 11," she said, tapping each leg. It is still one of the funnier jokes I've heard. I am from a family of walkers and New Yorkers — the two identities feeling almost interchangeable at times. I embody the cliché of the Queens native who has never driven a car, attempted to get a driver's license or even stepped inside a D.M.V. Why climb inside a vehicle stinking of gas and hot upholstery, a symbol of some of the more depressing side effects of the American dream, when I can just walk? Admittedly, I feel less that way now than I used to. And I am not the only one. In his recent guest essay for Times Opinion, the writer Shaan Sachdev takes up the mantle for walkers in New York City and everywhere. Citing experience and concerning statistical evidence, he analyzes the greater dangers that American walkers face — increased pedestrian fatalities, ever larger vehicles, more aggressive drivers and intense pressure on delivery people — and considers what the deeper implications of these dangers can be. "In addition to bringing the obvious consequences of death, injury and the erosion of civic life, this citywide discord has taken a toll on emotional and philosophical life, too," Sachdev writes. He follows in a long tradition of thinkers who have written about walking — some of whom he cites in his piece, like Friedrich Nietzsche, Jane Jacobs and, of course, Baudelaire — and how instrumental it was to their vivid inner worlds. Sachdev feels similarly: He writes that he "cannot finish an essay if it hasn't been aired out over 30 blocks." Sachdev's essay is a call to protect not only the walker but also the wanderer, or in high literary-speak, the flâneur. If you identify as one of them, keep walking — and keep your head up. Read the guest essay:
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Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Opinion Today: Long live the literary flâneur
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