Books

The Art of Travel

Alain de Botton

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: May 20, 2009
Category: Travel

A December afternoon in London — it’s depressing just to read those words, much less be there. But at the start of “The Art of Travel,” Alain de Botton is at his desk in London, looking at a travel brochure: palm trees, unspoiled beach, placid sea. He is reminded of the paintings that William Hodges made in Tahiti; he muses on the ways “a lengthy and ruinously expensive journey might be set in motion by nothing more than the sight of a photograph of a palm tree gently inclining in a tropical breeze.”

And he decides to go to Barbados.

Which is not to say the next thing that happens is the purchase of tickets and the packing of bags.

De Botton’s interests are not the usual ones: how many meals on the cruise ship, if there’s a casino near the hotel, might a supermodel be at the pool.

He cares about where to travel. Equally, he cares about why. And how. And what travel reveals about our quest for — and attainment of — happiness.

So before you smell the Coppertone, you first get an account of an 1884 novel about a French nobleman’s trip to London. And even when de Botton gets to the beach, is he there? From his account, he’s trapped in his head — stimulus simply inspires thought. Not a loss, as he sees it: “Our actual happiness…rarely endures for longer than ten minutes.” As that French novel suggests, “we may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there.”

De Botton next considers a different sort of travel: going to a gas station and an airport. Why? To look. To consider what Baudelaire had to say about travel. To lose himself in clouds. To review the career of Edward Hopper.

Well, why not? “Journeys are the midwives of thought.” It’s not where you go, it’s what you think there. And you will get ideas, because “thinking improves when parts of the mind are given other tasks.” Thus the importance of hotel note pads.

More trips covered in these pages: Flaubert in Egypt, de Botton in Madrid, Wordsworth (and, now, de Botton) in the Lake District. You should read with a pencil for the cool factoids and the sharp observation; you should also feel free to skim.

At last de Botton travels to Provence. Ah, who does not love Provence? Well, Alain de Botton, for one. He has come to visit friends, hoping to find the beautiful landscapes he’s heard so much about. But “the olive trees look stunted, more like bushes than like trees, and the wheat fields evoked the flat, dull expanses of southeastern England, where I had attended a school and been unhappy.”

Provence is an artist’s favorite; de Botton decides to study the visual arts. He starts with the obvious — Van Gogh — but quickly moves beyond the cliches to the paintings themselves. And what he discovers, by looking hard at what’s around him, is that Van Gogh was a realist. Those cypress trees, they really did move in the wind. The blue sky lacks a trace of white. At night, the sky holds “a profusion of colors.” So de Botton starts to draw. The results are immediate: He sees more, and his language sharpens about what he sees.

When he returns home, he considers the travel writing of Xavier de Maistre, who took a “journey” in 1798 — around his bedroom. (A very good idea, de Maistre suggested, for the poor and fearful.) De Botton takes the hint and goes for a walk around his neighborhood. And, of course, “once I began to consider everything of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.” He learns the hardest lesson of all: “to notice what we have already seen.”

All books are trips, if only from start to finish. Some cushion the ride; they’re cotton candy, formula entertainment. Books we cherish tend to shake us along the way — they’re dotted with surprises, thrills, challenges, reversals. It’s a rougher ride, and sweatier, but when you get to the end, you know you’ve been somewhere. Food tastes fresher, colors look sharper, experience feels deeper. And you somehow feel more alive.

“The Art of Travel” is a pointed, powerful reminder of how rich your life can be — right where you are. Look around. Don’t see it? Then read this book.

To buy “The Art of Travel” from Amazon.com, click here.

To buy de Botton’s “How Proust Can Change Your Life” from Amazon.com, click here.