An Afternoon With Nowhere to Be

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An Afternoon With Nowhere to Be

Julian wanted one afternoon that did not improve anything. His week was a chain of slots, each one measured, and even his walks had become routes with a finish line. He left the apartment with his phone in his pocket and the map unopened. If he got lost, that would be the point.

He knew the old picture of this mood. In nineteenth-century Paris, the flâneur walked the city in order to look, not to arrive. A tourist, by contrast, usually carries a list: a museum, a view, a time to be back. Julian wanted the other kind of movement, the kind with no predetermined end. He had read Jean-Paul Sartre on the burden of having to choose, and an empty afternoon made that burden obvious. Nobody was going to assign the hour a purpose.