Just finished a great book titled A winter on the Nile: Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert and the temptations of Egypt by Anthony Sattin. Nightingale and Flaubert were both in Egypt at the same time, although they never met. Both were in quandaries; both knew that they were destined to do great things, but WHAT? Nightingale was wrestling with her family and convention that denied her calling to nurse. Flaubert wanted to write the great novel. He wrote one called "The Temptation of St Anthony". It took him three years. When he read it to his friends and asked them what he should do with it, they told him to burn it! Discouraged, he decided to take a trip to Egypt to clear his head.
Part of the fascination of this book is that our protagonists saw two very different Egypts. Nightingale visited temples and hospitals, discovered the roots of Christianity in ancient Egyptian religion and heard God calling her to commit to her destiny. Flaubert visited brothels, bathhouses and taverns, and came to grips with the reality of the "mysterious Orient" that he had fantasized about in provincial France. Knowing little of Nightingale and even less of Flaubert, this book has remedied some of my ignorance. Perhaps the moral of the story is that travel doesn't only broaden the mind, it focuses it on the true nature of the self. (Yes, I know how pompous this sounds).
The cover blurb says that Sattin is to Egypt what Dalrymple is to India, so I must try to find more of him.
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