cycleurs of the city
If the flâneur was the ambling philosopher of the metropolis, the cycleur is the thoughtful traveler of the megalopolis. “The cyclist,” she writes, “is sufficiently invisible to achieve what the pedestrian cannot: traveling in solitude and abandoning himself to the sweet flow of his thoughts.” As for other forms of getting around:
The urban pedestrian carries the city on his shoulders and is so immersed in the maelstrom that he can’t see anything except what is immediately in front of him. […] And the motorist, who travels vacuum-packed in his car, unable to hear or smell or see or really exist in the city, is no exception: his soul is blunted at every traffic light [.]
Thanks in large part to a welcoming and understated campaign of cycling propaganda by several of my friends, I recently bought a bike after months of hauling CitiBikes around. It’s been a wonderful way to explore wider regions of the city, and the rhythm of urban biking does feel superior to walking in many ways: perched above the street, brisk without blurring the City into sameness, requiring exertion without demanding exhaustion.
Still, Luiselli’s essay feels a little too literary, more concerned with puzzling out concepts than dealing with details. When I imagine a cycleur, I imagine New York City because that’s the only place I’ve spent any time biking. But how would cyclerie here compare to Stockholm or Amsterdam, with their enormous bike lanes, or places like Charlotte or San Antonio, car-centric cities that are still hostile to bike travel? Does getting run off the road by an angry driver into a strip-mall GreatClips count as the “sweet flow of thought”?
Even in New York, which does have plenty of places for mind-clearing bike rides, the overwhelming totality of the city is hard to avoid by any means of transit. Biking across the George Washington Bridge last weekend, for instance, felt very much like an immersive maelstrom—or at least like escaping some enormous machine. To that end, I’m not quite ready to give up on the stroll, particularly in a place like New York. With so many surfaces intaglioed with graffiti and grime and the hieroglyphs of old signs and stickers, there can be reward in walking rather than sailing through the stink.
I suppose it makes most sense to me to travel through a city—through many cities—in as many ways as possible. And for as many reasons as possible: after all, sometimes biking is wonderful not because it offers some last channel for the thinking person but because, as David Byrne put it in his Bicycle Diaries, “It just felt good to cruise down the dirty potholed streets.”
ben tapeworm