A desire for the end, simple release from mortality, informs nihilism. What must I do in order to fulfill my essence, my fate? This question torments the nihilist. He does not believe in nothing. He is the prototypical liberal taken to logical limits. Cutesy, nouveau ways of presentation, the task of aesthetical sensibility makes claims to supremacy over all other matters. A romantic is simply a nihilist existing in a state of abysmal denial. For the dandy, it is how he appears that trumps all.
As he walks through town with his notebook in tow and his cape draped elegantly over his shoulders, his face betrays the disdain he harbours for those who fail to understand him - he, the master-artist, the master-philosopher, the beautiful mind, wasted amongst the degenerate mass. Purity is exclusively his domain, and only he can hope to attain it. He walks glumly through the village, still yearning for purer times, for better times. Alas, as his sojourn nears its conclusion, he encounters the local drunkard, appearing as slovenly as ever, who asks for a pence to buy a drink. The dandy shoots him a cold stare, turning his cape in an equally dismissive manner, and marches onward for home. Upon returning to his studio, he draws a bath, strips off his garments, opens his veins, and waits for purity, because life is not where genuine being resides for the dandy.
There is the life-as-expected, the long journey to the middle, a search for the serenity-as-artifice, for the banal and the safe. This is life as a road map – meticulously planned in a general way. Here are the milestones, hit them on your way to the middle. The dandy can't lower himself to the petit bourgeois. It is repugnant to his 'nobler' sensibilities; the rabble rabble is below him.
The life unexpected comes to being through spontaneity. It is a life open to surprise, receptive of contingency. It breaks through the crust of repetition, refusing the teleology of rigid expectations and well-made plans. Life is wonder, bewilderment; it is not expressible simply in words or doctrine nor simply feelings and perceptions. What life is cannot be encapsulated in descriptions or speculations about what it should be, guaranteed. Life unfolds without knowledge of what is to come. The unknown is not an object the flaneur acquires, admires, critiques, and elevates by virtue of his general iridiscence. The dandy fears the unknown, even as the last drop of blood enters the bathwater. "Anywhere is better than here..." So begins the final entry in his notebook. He expires before finishing the thought.
