The Art of Travel: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

When he disembarks in the Amsterdam airport, de Botton is immediately fascinated by the exotic exit sign he sees overhead: the sign’s simplicity and peculiar Dutch vowel combinations give him “genuine pleasure,” acting as “a symbol of being abroad” by reminding him of his own country’s conventions. He sees “another history and mind-set” in the sign, as in the other accoutrements of everyday life in the Netherlands, and thinks of the “openness toward foreign influences” and “Calvinist aesthetic” that play a prominent role in Dutch history.

The sign proves “a simple but pleasing idea: countries are diverse, and practices variable across borders.” Moreover, this diversity feels like “an improvement on what my own country is capable of”—the exit sign seems to promise de Botton new possibilities of happiness.

De Botton recognizes that “the word exotic has traditionally been attached to more colourful things than Dutch signs,” and notes that it “became synonymous with the Middle East” in the early 1800s. Writers like Victor Hugo wrote extensively about “the Orient,” and Europeans became so fascinated with the Middle East’s seemingly-exotic customs that they even started to imitate them—for instance, obelisks became an architectural staple of public space in European cities.

As a young boy, the French novelist Gustave Flaubert was one such European captivated by the idea of the Orient. He hated his “sterile, banal and laborious” life in the city of Rouen, wrote about the Middle East’s allure in some of his earliest stories as a teenager, and lamented that he was destined to a “monotonous, sensible, stupid” life as a lawyer, like most of his peers in France.

Flaubert’s father died when he was 24, leaving him a great sum of money. Flaubert quickly set out for Egypt with his friend Maxime Du Camp. Flaubert recalled his “first sight of the Orient” as his ship approached the Egyptian shore, and he was thrilled to find himself amidst “Negroes, Negresses, camels, turbans, cudgellings to right and left, and earsplitting guttural cries” when he arrived.

Back in Amsterdam, de Botton books a hotel room, eats lunch in a café, and then sets out on a walk around the city. He sees “the exotic” in the city’s brickwork, narrow apartment buildings, affinity for bicycles, and grid system, among other things, all of which he contrasts with the London cityscape.

In front of one door, de Botton “felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there.” He notices an apartment without curtains, and wonders how “something as small as a front door in another country” could so profoundly capture his imagination, before remarking that details can be “rich in meaning” in people’s everyday lives as well as abroad. For de Botton, the building’s “modesty” and “honesty” contrast with the try-hard pretentiousness of London architecture—it is “modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness and light.”

In its “fugitive, trivial” sense, “exotic” often simply denotes the pleasure people take in novelty. But de Botton sees a “more profound pleasure” in the exotic: it points to how the norms of a foreign country can better match one’s “identity and commitments” than those of one’s home country. He sees his own attraction to this particular Dutch house as a sign of his desire for the “modernity and aesthetic simplicity” that London lacks.

Just as de Botton’s own attraction to Amsterdam relates to his dissatisfaction with London, Flaubert’s hatred for the French bourgeoisie was what drove him to obsess over the “Orient.” He found France’s “extreme prudery, snobbery, smugness, racism and pomposity” so obscene that he wrote a satirical Dictionary of Received Ideas cataloguing its absurd attitudes. De Botton quotes from this work at length, and argues that the Middle East was “temperamentally a logical fit” for Flaubert’s personality and values.

First, Flaubert loved the “chaos, both visual and auditory, of Egyptian life.” He wrote of its soundscape, marked by yells and animal noises from all sides, its tendency to bold colors and architectural ornamentation, and its inhabitants’ flamboyant manner of speech. Chaos, he thought, was the natural flow of life; order was a misplaced attempt to censor the human condition. In this vein, Flaubert complained to his mistress about Europeans’ desire to keep their cemeteries “neat and tidy,” while Egyptians’ cemeteries were “run-down, ravaged, in ruins,” as they should be.

In one of Cairo’s cafes, Flaubert wrote about “a donkey shitting and a gentleman pissing in a corner,” which no one found out of the ordinary. The second reason Flaubert’s personality aligned with Egypt was that he believed that people “were not simply spiritual creatures but also pissing and shitting ones,” and he appreciated that Egyptians acknowledged the lower, impure functions of human life as well as the higher, pure ones. People belched in restaurants and “the most virtuous and respectable women” had no qualms about speaking indecently.

Thirdly, Flaubert loved camels above all else, writing that “nothing has a more singular grace than this melancholic animal.” In de Botton’s eyes, Flaubert loved the camel’s “stoicism and ungainliness,” its humble and awkward strength that contrasted with Europe’s showy optimism.

In Amsterdam, de Botton sees a woman, who seems to belong there, pushing a bicycle whose basket contains her groceries and includes a carton reading “Goodappletje.” While she would find nothing exotic about the image of herself, de Botton claims, he feels a need to understand everything he can about her life. Similarly, on a boat in France, Flaubert spotted a beautiful woman and wrote of his obsessive curiosity about strangers, whose lives (and naked bodies) he so loved imagining.

The exoticism of a foreign country adds to attractive people’s appeal, de Botton argues, and perhaps one’s attraction to those from another place is part of one’s attempt to capture that culture’s values. In a town on the banks of the Nile, Flaubert visited a famous courtesan (she was not merely a prostitute, de Botton assures the reader, for her role in society was far more dignified). Flaubert recalls her body, and then the feeling of sharing a bed with her. He hopes that she will think of him “more than of the others who have been there.” And the second time he visits her, he feels an “infinite sadness” that never subsides.

De Botton wonders whether Flaubert’s interest in Egypt was merely an ideal fantasy he projected onto it. However, he did spend nine months intensively studying its language, culture, and history, and in fact his dark features and adoption of Egyptian dress often led him to pass for native. People even began to call him “Abu Chanab,” or “Father of the Moustache.”

That said, Flaubert was also ultimately disappointed by Egypt in many ways. As his traveling companion Maxime Du Camp explained long after the fact, Flaubert became “quiet and withdrawn” while traveling down the Nile, just as he had been in France, and he quickly found the landscape too uniform for his taste. Flaubert wrote about his boredom with temples, his inevitable slip back into depression, and his continued frustration with Europeans (like the British man who carved his name into a pillar in Alexandria).

Yet de Botton insists that Flaubert “exchanged a youthful crush” on Egypt “for a knowledgeable love” of it. Although it did not precisely meet his expectations, he claimed to have “few illusions” and even wrote to his mother that the Orient “extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it.”

Leaving Egypt devastated Flaubert, who thought about his trip constantly until the end of his life, and even spoke of it on his deathbed. This lifelong fixation, de Botton argues, “seems like an invitation to deepen and respect our own attraction to certain countries.”

In fact, Flaubert contended that nationality should follow this attraction rather than the contingencies of one’s birth—at times, he identified as “in truth a woman, a camel, and a bear” and thought he was “as much Chinese as I am French.” He felt as loyal to Arabs as to his countrymen and declared himself “a soul brother to everything that lives.” Like Flaubert, de Botton argues, all people are “scattered at birth by the wind onto various countries,” but gain the means in adulthood to “re-create our identity in line with our true allegiances.”