Pushed to the extreme, a mentality based on pure utility can risk missing the little things that make one’s days pleasant and enjoyable. Walking is one of them.

It might take about the same time to go from point A to point B in a suburban or urban environment, paying little attention to the place (one where there are sidewalks, and it’s safe to walk around, which isn’t a given everywhere) than, say, taking a stroll in which one wanders and daydreams.

But walking, the trait that made us human, is much more than pure utility. Rebecca Solnit makes an essential point in Wanderlust. Walking is much more than reaching the place we want to go or just moving. It’s a way of letting one’s mind go, an opportunity to be present.

“Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.”

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

It might be a pleasant or very cold day, or the fog might create a sense of danger. It can also help resurface one idea we were working on, or we may get the solution to our last creative conundrum —or simply return to the routine reenergized. We can dwell on the differences every single time. It’s a wanderlust indeed.

Intentionality: the power of a walk

Studies suggest that doomscrolling makes us exhausted, anxious, and depleted. Walking might just do the opposite. When we wander, admiring random aspects that we find relatable, we do many things at once, all of them beneficial. We are exercising but also decompressing.

We are walking but also out in a quest for discovery, which affects our mood and can make our day. We pay attention to the people, the storefronts, the houses and their style or architecture, the gardens, a particular urban tree, a little park, a squirrel skilfully crossing the street.

Take the challenge and do a test, even if you don’t have “that kind of time.” I assure anybody skeptical that it’s possible to even wander (or “saunter,” a word used often by Thoreau) at non-places like Costco.

Admire the inner workings of the logistics, the way things are piled, the skillful placement of essential things at the end of the giant warehouse, so one has to go through a universe of things before getting to one’s own Holy Grail, the grimace of fellow customers as they enter the freezing mega-chamber keeping the piles of milk and dairy, blaming the universe for the bad timing (for the Hunger-Game battle to hoard eggs can’t happen in an empty chamber).

After the sudden disappointment, the saunterer might relate the consistent lack of any eggs at all to the national freak-out concerning the precious product, capable of tilting an election that had promised the return of Egg Paradise, and also consider the massive recall of bird-flu-contaminated hens and eggs affecting places like nearby Petaluma, once considered the “Egg Basket of the World.”

When your errand becomes a part of your bliss

A big egg recall in 2023 almost bankrupted Sunrise Farms, one of the last big poultry farms connected to Petaluma, and the current avian flu epidemic is no exception, causing many firms to live on the brink of an unexpected contingency.

You might think about the Olivera Egg Ranch, a historical mom-and-pop poultry company from San Jose that had decided to close its doors before the current price bonanza, making room for new homes in an area awash in wealth after local behemoths like Nvidia have risen to the top of the corporate world.

Ed Olivera Jr., 76, is shuttering his third-generation family operation even in a context where any farm free of bird flu could profit from the current egg craze, which is likely to climb in the weeks leading up to Easter— when egg consumption traditionally reaches its apex.

To Olivera Jr., however, the industry’s volatility and concentration was a race to the bottom that squeezed any guarantee for his company to remain as one of the last local producers of fresh and affordable eggs. “I could’ve made more money in the last three months than I sold my ranch for, as long as I didn’t get bird flu,” he said to Jia H. Jung from the San Jose Mercury News. He could have given it one last try if he were 10 years younger, he says.

The transformation of the Bay Area hinterlands from a suburban-agrarian middle-class haven into the center of the post-World War II knowledge economy and its inequalities is complete (as explained by Malcolm Harris in his 2023 book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, which I’m currently finishing).

A dairy mega-fridge and Thoreau’s “sauntering”

You keep walking and notice what the people attracted by the freebie carts may have in common; some of them look certainly on their side, considering that their trip to this properly illuminated and stocked, boxy, ugly, hyper-utilitarian warehouse is, in fact, their weekly promenade of choice.

You imagine Thoreau teleported from the Concord jail, where he was put after refusing to pay his poll tax to protest against slavery and the US war against Mexico, and put to walk with you from isle to isle at the particular East Bay Costco Warehouse closest to your house. He would probably “walk” the way he was used to, even in this contemporary temple.

In Walking, his essay for The Atlantic (published in June 1862, shortly after his death), Thoreau makes a decisive difference between those who know how to walk with an open spirit and those whose intention is to go from one place to another with purpose and efficiency, but without presence, a sense for discovery, and esteem for what our mental and physical divagation might bring us.

“I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”

That’s some commitment to the idea of walking for the sake of it, connecting with the deeper, sacred purpose that the verb “saunter” suggests: a pilgrimage to one’s own Holy Land, which isn’t a particular place but an abstract aspiration —that of roaming not aimlessly, but with intentionality, a will to discover and stay receptive.

Even at Costco’s surprisingly empty Dairy mega-fridge, a place where some people will start a conversation with somebody who just walked in and looks equally amazed at the big egg mystery.

The transcendentalists and the Barbizon School

Thoreau understood the act of wandering as a personal rebellion against the inertia of modernity towards efficiency, time regimentation, and urban expansion. He preferred to “saunter” in nature, though never too far from the edge of town, in the same way that Parisians hoped on the train to spend the day or weekend in the forest of Fontainebleau, just like Gustave Flaubert depicts in Sentimental Education, a book in which “nothing important happens” but life itself.

I remember reading the book when we happened to live in Fontainebleau, and I certainly appreciated knowing about the first “promenades in nature,” or the invention of “hiking,” which is a modern affair. In 1861, or eleven years before Yellowstone became the first National Park, a portion of Fontainebleau was turned into the world’s first nature preserve.

During the mid to late nineteenth century, the area surrounding the protected forest of Fontainebleau, first kept as hunting grounds of the French royalty (and the Bonapartes, a pseudo-royalty in its own right) around the chateau of Fontainebleau, became a haven for artists and intellectuals seeking a respite from the city.

The place, packed with boulders of astounding shapes, was soon favored by artists seeking inspiration and communion with nature, much in the fashion of Thoreau and the rest of the American transcendentalists.

Many painters settled in the nearby village of Barbizon, which gave rise to the realist Barbizon School; among them, Camille Corot, who had a distinguished style that led to impressionism, wasn’t particularly inclined towards art until he began taking daily walks to the forest with the patriarch of the Sennegon family, with whom young Corot lived.

Those walks were the seed of his particular vision of art. By the way, when in Paris I could go to the Louvre just to admire Corot any day. And I used many “free Sundays” where locals don’t pay for museums just to do that.

A picture taken in the forest of Fontainebleau

Many others (Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas) defined their style amid walks around the forest of Fontainebleau. Flaubert didn’t only depict the forest in Sentimental Education but described his own walks in his letters; Mallarmé composed poems, George Sand searched for solitude and inspiration, and Robert Louis Stevenson stayed in Barbizon while in France.

It’s also a musical place: Claude Debussy composed there, and Franz Liszt frequently escaped to the area during his time in Paris.

Back in 2018, when we lived in Fontainebleau, and our children attended the bilingual school, CAB, our middle daughter was singing in the local choir, which decided to host a rehearsal in the area that had been declared the first protected natural park in the world. It was mesmerizing to hear the children sing amid the trees and little paths.

Our friends were mostly parents of other children at the school our kids attended, and we didn’t have many relations outside that circle, but we knew who the local mayor was: a center-right, serious middle-aged man called Frédéric Valletoux, who was attending. After one of the songs, he approached us and was curious to hear our story; we could feel he spoke English, but our conversation took place in French, which was quite a feat, given that we had arrived in town two years before. He offered to take a picture of us (minus our middle daughter, still singing with the rest of the choir).

Politics were on fire back then in France, as they are right now, but that day in the forest of Fontainebleau, there were only adults and children celebrating a nice day, singing a few songs and thanking the people who, over 150 years before, had decided to protect the area for us to use.

We all knew that the duty of the current generation is to try to pass on the responsibility to keep the place for others to enjoy many years from now. It’s not difficult to understand; it has worked, and it will work as long as the consensus of the civil society with the vision to enact it holds.

Flânerie

Things can progress; they can also regress. It’s as easy to preserve good things as it is to look at them from a utilitarian point of view and neglect them—or, simply, suppress them to “log, baby, log” (or was it “drill, baby, drill,” or both?). Many parts of the forest of Fontainebleau, still in private hands, are forested with limitations, although tree farming has given way to more diverse commercial areas that are a natural continuation working as a buffer zone of the protected areas.

Big cities were surrounded by the fumes of factories and coal burning, cholera epidemics, and unrest, and urbanists planned to make cities more predictable and less prone to epidemics and insecurity by opening big boulevards and demolishing conflictive spots, often turning them into public markets and open squares.

Baron Haussmann’s renovations of Paris transformed the city between 1853 and 1870, turning a medieval capital of winding streets into a monument of perspective and rationality, building upon Napoleon’s idea of interconnecting wide boulevards and grand avenues, many of them tree-lined and equipped with wide sidewalks.

However, many didn’t like the transformation of the organic medieval grid, which gave way to a Euclidean, more rectilinear design, destroying buildings and entire streets considered insalubrious to sanitize central Paris. To get a glimpse of the olfactive and physical experience of walking across the overcrowded streets of pre-Haussmann central Paris, read the beginning of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. Here’s the beginning of the book’s second paragraph:

“In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces.”

Nobody can accuse Süskind of a lack of sensorial awareness.

When Patrick Süskind Perfume arrived in our Barcelona street

That said, poet Charles Baudelaire, an early proponent of the French art of the “flanêur,” or wandering with no other purpose than being open to serendipity and quotidian beauty while on a random stroll, Baron Haussmann’s renovations of Paris had destroyed the city’s soul.

How could one cherish the art of flânerie if the streets to wander were hygienic, rectilinear and predictable boulevards? How to preserve the intimate, mysterious, and organic character of the old city? That some places were ravaged by insecurity and disease didn’t matter much to Baudelaire, a poet who like to live on the fringes of society, as attested by his Fleurs du mal.

If Thoreau wandered in the forest, Baudelaire took the same pleasure by venturing through the vanishing labyrinthine streets, hidden alleys, and small shops, which he believed fostered chance encounters and poetic inspiration.

Baudelaire had a point. Proof of that: when Tom Tykwer, director of the 2006 film adaptation of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, was cowriting the screenplay with Andrew Birkin and Bernd Eichinger, they realized they had a big problem: the Paris described by Süskind was mainly gone, thanks to the celebrated renovation of the city by Haussmann; not even the remains of the old grid around the Marais and residual little corners of the Rive Gauche and Île de la Cité were enough to depict some of the scenes.

So the film selected the Old City of Barcelona to recreate corners of the eighteenth-century Parisian underworld, and, guess what? The selected streets concentrated around the place where we were living at the time, just around and behind the Plaça Reial. That we ended up avoiding the little streets we took every day due to a film that was supposed to happen in another city and time seemed ironic enough.

We’ve always liked to wander in the places we’ve lived, whether in the city or the countryside, so this “coincidence” is more a feature of our affinities and biased priorities; which explains why, when we left Fontainebleau for Paris in the summer of 2018, we ended up renting an apartment in a little cobble-stoned street in the young and “bobo” 9ème Arrondissement, called Cité de Trévise; while we lived there, there were several shootings for TV and cinema, including the 2019 historical drama film An Officer and a Spy about the Dreyfus affair that inspired Émile Zola’s J’Accuse! article for the newspaper L’Aurore. These don’t seem to be the days of public intellectuals like Zola, capable of shaming a society and a system by putting a mirror in front of them for them to reflect on where collective bigotry can lead.

From Baudelaire’s lost Paris to Berkeley’s Normandy Village

I experience these and many other associations as I leave my wander-experience in the artificial temple of logistics and distribution by the water on the East Bay, one among the many Costco Warehouses in the area. I head then to a more Baudelaire-friendly experience.

When I walk around the mainly suburban East Bay, I certainly perceive the tension explained by Thoreau, Baudelaire, and others between modernity’s alienation and the fleeting beauty of everyday things. There’s always a group of houses, a tranquil street, a little park by a small creek, a tucked-away café by a park where people take advantage of the mild weather to talk, read, rest a bit during their study or work break, etc.

From Baudelaire’s Le Cygne:

“Le vieux Paris n’est plus, la forme d’une ville
Change plus vite, hélas ! que le cœur d’un mortel.”

(“Old Paris is gone, the form of a city
Changes faster, alas, than a mortal’s heart.”)

So, I ventured into a local last stand for poetry and personal introspection against alienation and the destruction of the fabric of society: having an active community near your place, as well as mixed-use streets you can walk to and blend with whatever is happening there.

I stumbled upon the place a visit after Costco on a morning run a few months ago. From a distance, it looks like a fairy-tale European village somebody has dropped in the East Bay, with the charm and quirkiness that only come with quality craft, real materials, organic shapes and layout, and the patina of time.

The name of this little urban development, unique in the Bay Area, is Thorburg Village, though people also call it Normandy Village. If it looks like the real deal, the fact that it was built in the 1920s by Californians at the time (many of whom had emigrated from Europe or were members of second-generation families).

An Oakland Tribune’s 1927 article

Hiding in plain sight in the intersection of Hearst and Spruce, this Berkeley corner is the perfect spot for the wander that propels this article. Destiny and destination share the same root, so it’s fair to end my walk here.

And, since we mention Émile Zola’s 1898 article on the cover of the French newspaper L’Aurore, we can go ahead and read an article that the Oakland Tribune ran on May 8, 1927 about Normandy Village, which it called an “artistic adaptation of the architectural thought of rural Europe,” which brings me back memories of our time living at Rue Saint Merry, in the village of Fontainebleau.

Now, the promised Oakland Tribune article:

UNIQUE APARTMENT STRUCTURE FINISHED HERE

Thornburg Village Is Adaptation of Rural European Style of Achitecture.

Thornburg Village, a conception of the art of humble European builders with names long forgotten, is now far enough advanced for public appreciation. Located in a grove of trees almost at the edge of the university campus, on Spruce Street just above Hearst, this unique project is daily attracting interested spectators. Combining in its rural European style the influences of villages from the Scandinavian peninsula to the Mediterranean, methods of construction are exhibited evoking the past […].

The first unit of Thornburg Village centers in a circular court, reached through an arched entrance. Brick paving is irregularly laid, pitching to the center. The walls, not only of the court but the exterior as well, are a combination of brick and stone with contrasting colors and textures as if traced and warped by time. Outside stairs lead to each of the eight apartments, straight and rigid lines in the exterior openings being avoided by fitting each unit at different floor levels. Large windows are the rule, and the charm of the strange building is enhanced by carved heads or grotesque gargoyles hanging above the first story. The roof lines are broken, appearing as irregularly laid stone, soft and weathered, with tile along the ridges.

Picturesque Thornburg Village, Oakland Tribune (May 8, 1927)

The interiors described by the article were also up to the task; they featured earthen fireplaces, dowelled oak floors, and a general hand-crafted appearance.

It’s difficult not to be interested in the developer who made Normandy Village happen. Jack Wood Thornburg was only 25 when he built what he envisioned as the beginning of a much bigger bohemian enclave. He used the Tribune article to try to lure investors to keep developing the “village,” unfortunately to no avail.

A young’s architect take on the Great War

Thornburg enrolled William Raymond Yelland of Oakland as an architect. Yelland was a native of Saratoga and used his experience in the traumatic Great War (WWI was the first big-scale modern conflagration, a nightmare of trenches, chemical weapons, tanks, and modern heavy artillery). However, Yelland, stationed in France, had time to appreciate the vernacular, which he brought to the Bay Area.

A year after the first part of Thornburg Village opened, a small addition of 12 apartments called Norman Towers was finished, too, calling for occupancy offers. According to the Oakland Tribune:

“The floors are of various woods, some in mahogany plank laid with wooden dowels, some of parqueted redwood block laid on end, and others of oak plank. Lighting fixtures also are individual and of hand-made wrought iron from the studio of the Berkeley Craftsman. The fireplaces are in brick and plaster, odd-shaped and elevated.”

Thornburg’s goal was to build not only a set of homes, apartments, and a garden in a continental European craftsman’s style but also add shops and restaurants with brick and stone facades, steep gables, tower rooms, and turrets, but zoning and funding got in the way.

Things go, things stay

As I walk around what we would call today a “pocket neighborhood” designed with “walkability” in mind, I think about how freely my mind wanders as I look at the pleasant, almost soothing shapes and materials of the houses, which bring me closer to one among many conceptual “homes” I’m fortunate to recognize as a part of our personal biography. Perhaps the kids will like to check it out, too, one of these days.

As I wrap this up, I recall that Walter Benjamin, a fine critic of the unintended consequences of modernity, toiled around the unfinished Arcades Project.

Benjamin noted that many of the fascinating “passages couverts” of Paris, iron-and-glass covered arcades filled with stores and life and acting as little “villages within villages,” had disappeared with Haussmann’s renovation of Paris.

Benjamin wasn’t naïve and argued that the renovation wasn’t only about aesthetics but also about real estate speculation and, especially, about controlling crowds and suppressing potential revolutionary uprisings.

It’s always healthy to look at things with curiosity and skepticism, especially when they change fast, in order to prevent us from enjoying the enchantment of the world.