The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [27]
Louise replied that she found it absurd to think of Flaubert as being either Chinese or Arab, a retort that provoked the novelist, in a letter written a few days later, to return to his charge with greater emphasis and irritation: Tm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country—that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black—has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid. I am a soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man.'
We are all of us, without ever having any say in the matter, scattered at birth by the wind onto various countries, but like Flaubert, we are in adulthood granted the freedom imaginatively to re-create our identity in line with our true allegiances. When we grow weary of our official nationality (from Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas: ‘FRENCH—”How proud one is to be French when one looks at the Colonne Vendóme!” ‘), we may withdraw to those parts of ourselves that are more Bedouin than Norman, that delight in riding on a camel through a khamsin, in sitting in a café beside a shitting donkey and in engaging in what Edward Lane called ‘licentious conversation'.
When asked where he came from, Socrates said not ‘From Athens' but ‘From the world.' Flaubert was from Rouen (in his youthful account, a place drowning in ‘merde', whose good citizens ‘jerk themselves silly' on Sundays out of boredom), and yet Abu Chanab, the Father of the Moustache, might have answered, perhaps a little from Egypt, too.
IV
On Curiosity
1.
In the springtime I was invited to Madrid to attend a three-day conference that was scheduled to end on a Friday afternoon. Because I had never visited the city before and had been told on several occasions of its many attractions (which were apparently not limited to museums), I decided to extend my stay by a few days. My hosts had booked me a hotel on a wide, tree-lined avenue in the southeastern part of the city. My room overlooked a courtyard in which a short man with a certain resemblance to Philip II occasionally stood and smoked a cigarette while tapping his foot on the steel door of what I supposed was a cellar. On the Friday evening, I retired early to my room. I had not revealed to my hosts that I would be staying the weekend, for fear of forcing them into a halfhearted hospitality from which neither side would benefit. But my decision also meant that I had to go without dinner, for I realised on walking back to the hotel that I was too shy to venture alone into any of the neighbourhood restaurants, all dark, wood-panelled places, many with a ham hanging from the ceiling, where I risked becoming an object of curiosity and pity. So I ate a packet of paprika-flavoured crisps from the minibar and, after watching the news on satellite television, fell asleep.
When I awoke the next morning, it was to an intense lethargy, as though my veins had become silted up with fine sugar or sand. Sunlight shone through the pink-and-grey plastic-coated curtains, and traffic could be heard along the avenue. On the desk lay several magazines provided by the hotel, offering information about the city and two guidebooks that I had brought from home. In their different ways, they conspired to suggest that