From Edmund White's gloriously thoughtful The Flâneur::
The flâneur [city walker/wanderer] is by definition endowed with enormous leisure, someone who can take off a morning or afternoon for undirected ambling, since a specific goal or a close rationing of tme is antithetical to the true spirit of the flâneur. An excess of the work ethic (or a driving desire to see everything and meet everyone of recognized value) inhibits the browsing, cruising ambition to "wed the crowd."
Americans are particularly ill-suited to be flâneurs. They're good at following books outlining tours of Montparnasse or at visiting scenic spots outside Paris…but they're always driven by the urge towards self-improvement.
A couple of assumptions are embedded in this concept: that the wandering should take place in the city (as described in Walter Benjamin's epochal Arcades project) and that the drifter, if you will, shall be alone. But is either necessarily the case? Perhaps for Benjamin, an urban philosopher.
It's interesting to posit the counter-example of Jack Kerouac, who certainly made a life and great work out of his wandering, but does have that "driven" aspect that White describes, and even made a bit of sport of his inability to wander idly in his great and underappreciated Dharma Bums.
A pic of Kerouac typing from the Orange County Regional History Center.
He wrote in that book:
“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”
Kit Stolz 