The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [19]
As it happened, he would, for when Gustave was twenty-four, his father died unexpectedly, leaving him a fortune that allowed him to sidestep the bourgeois career he had seemed destined for, with its attendant small talk about drowned cattle. He began at once to plan an Egyptian trip, assisted in the task by his friend Maxime Du Camp, a fellow student who shared his passion for the East and combined it with the practical turn of mind that was a necessary requirement for anyone wishing to undertake a journey there.
The two Oriental enthusiasts left Paris at the end of October 1849 and after a stormy sea crossing from Marseilles arrived in Alexandria in the middle of November. ‘When we were two hours out from the coast of Egypt, I went up to the bow with the chief quartermaster and saw the seraglio of Abbas Pasha like a black dome on the blue of the Mediterranean,' Flaubert reported to his mother. ‘The sun was beating down on it. I had my first sight of the Orient through, or rather in, a glowing light that was like melted silver on the sea. Soon the shore became distinguishable; the first thing we saw on land was a pair of camels led by their driver, and then, on the dock, some Arabs peacefully fishing. We landed amidst the most deafening uproar imaginable: Negroes, Negresses, camels, turbans, cudgellings to right and left, and earsplitting guttural cries. I gulped down a whole bellyful of colours, like a donkey filling himself with hay'
3.
In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel in the Jordaan district and after lunch in a café [roggebrood met baring en uitjes) went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert's Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern-day Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar (far more regular than English or North American brickwork, and exposed to view, unlike the bricks on French or German buildings); long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows; bicycles parked outside every house (recalling university towns); street furniture displaying a certain democratic scruffiness; an absence of ostentatious buildings; straight streets interspersed with small parks, suggesting the hand of planners with dreams of a socialist garden city. In one street lined with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening. I wanted to stand by the curtainless window at dusk, looking out at the identical apartment opposite, and then snack my way through an erwentsoep metroggebrooden spek before retiring to read in bed in a white room with white sheets.
Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements may seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. There, too, we may find ourselves anchoring emotions of love on the way a person butters his or her bread, or recoiling at his or her taste in shoes. To condemn ourselves for these minute concerns is to ignore how rich in meaning details may be.
My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to a financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London