"The Art of Travel" [.]

[fiefoe]

Flaubert / Humboldt / (Burke / Woodsworth) / (Van Gogh / Rushkin)

• One of the spectators was a moody twelve-year-old hoy named Gustave Flaubert, whose greatest wish was to leave Rouen, become a camel driver in Egypt and lose his virginity in a harem.
• the exoticism of shitting donkeys
• 'Order is so stupid.' / Dictionary of Received Ideas
  

• Emerson on Humboldt: He was one of those wonders of the world, like Aristotle, like Julius Caesar, like the Admirable Crichton, who appear from time to time as if to how us the possibilities of the human mind.
• He compared salinity of water from the Pacific and the Atlantic and conceived the idea of sea currents, recognising that the temperature of the sea owed more to drifts than to latitude.
  
• How does a person come to be interested in the exact height at which he or she sees a fly?
• Unfortunately for the traveller, most objects don't come affixed with the question that will generate the excitement they deserve.
• Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances.
  
• Travel twists our curiosity according to a superficial geographical logic, as superficial as if a university course were to prescribe books according to their size rather than subject matter.
  

• Of the middle-aged middle-class women of Arles, van Gogh asserted, "Some women resemble a Fragonard and some a Renoir, (but there are some that nobody has painted yet!)
• With its conelike shape, (the cypress) takes on the appearance of a flame flickering nervously in the wind. All of this van Gogh noticed and would make others see.
• 'Drawing is like the act of eating or drinking'. What unites the three activities is that they all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world.
• 'Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves?' {This is the sentence that made me want to read more Rushkin.}

William Hodges' Tahiti paintings; J. K. Huysman 'A Rebours'; the Greek termed eudaimonia, or 'human flourishing'
Chamfort's dictum: A man must swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead.

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