Word of the day: flâneur

The word of the day is flâneur:

< French flâneur, < flâner: see flânerie n.

A lounger or saunterer, an idle ‘man about town’. Also transf.  (OED)

"Banville's exploratory monologues owe much to the modernist idea of the disaffiliated flâneur, Poe's 'man of the crowd,' who creeps through the teeming city, or through the dreamscapes of his own mind, trying to 'understand and appreciate everything that happens,' as Baudelaire puts it.  The 'mainspring of his genius is his curiosity,' Baudelaire added, and this description could equally describe the average noir detective.  Indeed, the meandering flâneur and the solitary noir detective have so much in common that they could even be dark brothers.  Joyce's Leopold Bloom, Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Borges's detective Lönnrot, Black's Quirke, and Banville's various narrators all creep through their own lives, and the lives of other people, amassing fragments, shards of experience, trying to understand something—anything—of death, of disappearance, the past, or why we live and perish, or the bizarreness of what we call ordinary life.  They share a refusal of the world of 'other people', a sense that exclusion is the only option.  To be an insider—for flâneurs and detectives, for Banville and for Black—is to be an enemy or a fool."

 - Joanna Kavenna, "Pseudonymously Yours: The strange case of Benjamin Black", 11 & 18 July 2011 The New Yorker