In Paris (한나 아렌트의 파리 찬가)

 

Hannah Arendt's Introduction in Walter Benjamin,

Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt (1969) 에서:

"In Paris a stranger feels at home because he can inhabit the city 

the way he lives in his own four walls. And just as one inhabits

an apartment, and makes it comfortable, by living in it instead of

just using it for sleeping, eating, and working, so one inhabits a

city by strolling through it without aim or purpose, with one's stay

secured by the countless cafes which line the streets and past

which the life of the city, the flow of pedestrians, moves along.

To this day Paris is the only one among the large cities which

can be comfortably covered on foot, and more than any other city

it is dependent for its liveliness on people who pass by in the

streets, so that the modern automobile traffic endangers its very

existence not only for technical reasons. The wasteland of an

American suburb, or the residential districts of many towns,

where all of street life takes place on the roadway and where one

can walk on the sidewalks, by now reduced to footpaths, for miles

on end without encountering a human being, is the very opposite

of Paris. What all other cities seem to permit only reluctantly to the

dregs of society -- strolling, idling, flanerie -- Paris streets

actually invite everyone to do. Thus ever since the Second Empire

the city has been the paradise of all those who need to chase

after no livelihood, pursue no career, reach no goal -- the

paradise, then, of bohemians, and not only of artists and writers

but of all those who have gathered about them because they

could not be integrated either politically -- being homeless or

stateless -- or socially."

Claude Monet, Le Parc Monceau, Paris