Movement is central to modernity. Baudelaire's flaneur, a walker drifting through city streets, "a perfect idler, ... a passionate observer," who is a part of the urban throng even as he remains apart from it, is paradigmatic.
TOKYO IN TRANSIT: Japanese Culture on the Rails and Road, by Alisa Freedman. Stanford University Press, 2011, 333 pp., $22.95 (paper).
The flaneur, however, was more a response to the changed times than an agent of that change.
Trains, on the other hand, are central to the genesis of the new world that was born, in Virginia Woolf's phrase, "on or about December, 1910."
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