The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [22]
Why did the chaos, the richness, so touch Flaubert? Because of his belief that life was fundamentally chaotic and that aside from art, all attempts to create order implied a censorious and prudish denial of our condition. He expressed his feelings to his mistress Louise Colet, in a letter written during a trip to London in September 1851, only a few months after his return from Egypt: ‘We've just come back from a walk in Highgate Cemetery. What a gross corruption of Egyptian and Etruscan architecture it all is! How neat and tidy it is! The people in there seem to have died wearing white gloves. I hate little gardens around graves, with well-raked flower beds and flowers in bloom. This antithesis has always seemed to me to have come out of a bad novel. When it comes to cemeteries, I like those that are
Engraving from Edward Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1842): Private Houses in Cairo
run-down, ravaged, in ruins, full of thorns or tall weeds, and where a cow escaped from a neighbouring field has come to graze quietly. Admit that this is better than some policeman in uniform! How stupid order is!'
(II) THE EXOTICISM OF SHITTING DONKEYS
‘Yesterday we were at a café that is one of the best in Cairo,' wrote Flaubert a few months after his arrival in the capital, ‘and where there were at the same time as ourselves, inside, a donkey shitting and a gentleman pissing in a corner. No one finds such things odd; no one says anything.' And in Flaubert's eyes, they were right not to. Central to Flaubert's philosophy was the belief that humans were not simply spiritual creatures but also pissing and shitting ones, and that we should integrate the ramifications of this blunt idea into our view of the world. ‘I can't believe that man's body composed as it is of mud and shit and equipped with instincts lower than those of the pig or the crab louse, contains anything pure and immaterial,' he told Ernest Chevalier. Which was not to say that we humans were without any higher dimensions; it was just that the prudery and self-righteousness of the age aroused in Flaubert a desire to remind others of mankind's impurities, occasionally by taking the side of café urinators (or even the Marquis de Sade, advocate of buggery, incest, rape and underage sex: ‘I've just read a biographical article about de Sade by [the famous critic] Janin,' he informed Chevalier, ‘which filled me with revulsion—revulsion against Janin, needless to say, who held forth on behalf of morality, philanthropy, deflowered virgins…').
Flaubert found and welcomed in Egyptian culture a readiness to accept life's duality: shit-mind, life-death, sexuality-purity madness-sanity People belched to their hearts' content in restaurants. A boy of six or seven, passing Flaubert in a Cairo street, cried out in greeting, ‘I wish you all kinds of prosperity, especially a long prick.' Edward Lane also noted this duality, though he reacted to it more in the manner of Janin than of Flaubert: ‘The most immodest freedom of conversation is indulged in by persons of both sexes, and of every station of life, in Egypt; even by the most virtuous and respectable women. From persons of the best education, expressions are often heard so obscene as only to be fit for a low brothel; and things are named, and subjects talked of, by the most genteel women, without any idea of their being indecorous, in the hearing of men, that many prostitutes in our country would probably abstain from mentioning.'
(III) THE EXOTICISM OF CAMELS
‘One of the finest things is the camel,' wrote Flaubert from Cairo. ‘I never tire of watching this strange beast that