The Art of Travel

I read Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel on my recent trip to Seattle, mostly while in airplanes. I find airplanes to be fairly miserable places, so it helped to be a little philosophical about it. Well, that and Francisco's noise cancelling headphones, which blocked out those annoying every-five-seconds airport announcements that are particularly fatiguing.

Overall, Botton's position on travel is that while it doesn't change you (he notes that he had the exact same stresses in the Bahamas that he had before he left), traveling is better than looking at pictures of a place because it fills in all of the gaps in what you might be able to imagine without actually going there. In addition, he writes, "If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another country, our ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture."

Botton is obviously very learned--he writes about Charles Baudelaire and Edward Hopper and Gustave Flaubert, among others. He writes about their personal lives and their thoughts about travel. Botton's writing is a little serious and philosophical and spare, even when it is intimate. There is a formalism as if he is saying, "You are only my readers--I will share this much and no more." For instance, he mentions a lover in passing, but only identifies her as "M." Botton's writing is also poetic in its own way. First, it includes his own photographs from time to time (along with paintings and other pictures). In addition, Botton's use of details is poetic--he mentions a tape recorder in the Lake District that was playing Peruvian music; he mentions the size of men's feet in Spain; he analyzes the lettering on an airport sign in Schipol.

In one chapter, he writes about how Van Gogh helped him really see Provence (which he was otherwise unimpressed by). I like to read poetry or novels from the places I'm traveling in for just this reason: for instance, The Red and the Black in France, Fateless in Budapest, the Brownings in England and Italy, Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt on my travels on summer with Stearns (where we read all of the books that we brought with us and then switched).

Botton writes about encountering the sublime in travel. I wonder why the sublime refers to the sense of being small or weak in front of large natural wonders. Botton describes it as the experience of dangerous things that are impersonal (not after us), which show us our own limitations. I always use sublime to refer to the almost transcendent experience of seeing a work of genius. On the point of the sublime, when I was on my Seattle flight, we passed a dozen or so thunderstorms. Since it was night, you could see the lightning flickering in the distance, and sometimes very close: there was a whole circle of clouds beside us that would light up every few seconds. Typically I'm scared to death of lightning, but I guess not being able to hear the thunder helped. It seems like lightning can't hit you while you're in an airplane, since it isn't connected to the ground (not that I really believe that: if a cloud can hit another cloud with lightning, I don't know why it can't hit an airplane).


(picture, picture)