The Jay-Blog: The Art of Travel

July 01, 2003

The Art of Travel

On the flight to Vienna, I read Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel cover to cover. It’s a charming book. Each chapter mixes the author’s feelings about a particular trip he’s on with descriptions of how a particular philosopher would have looked at it. In The Lake District, an area once overlooked as drab and featureless, he talks of Wordsworth describing the beauty of sparrows and brooks and nature all around. At first his contemporaries considered him a simpleton, but in time he won them over. People became alert to the beauty around them; The Lake District became a tourist attraction. De Botton still flashes on the perfect symmetry of two trees, drilled into his head in a fleeting moment on his trip there.

John Ruskin wanted people to wake up by drawing what they saw. If you don’t want to draw, Ruskin suggests you “word-paint.” Van Gogh’s mission was to enable people to see the colors and essence of Provence that other artists had not conveyed.

De Botton’s long, winding sentences put me in a contemplative mood. The best (and funniest) in the book: “Such climatic circumstances, together with a sequence of evens that occurred at around this time (and seemed to confirm Chamfort’s dictum that a man must swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead), conspired to render me intensely susceptible to the unsolicited arrival one later afternoon of a large, brightly illustrated brochure entitled 'Winter Sun'.” And so begins his trip to Barbados, where he affirms that most of a trip occurs in your head, with you seeing what you expected to see.

Gustave Flaubert hated France in general and the bourgeoisie in particular. He traveled in Egypt, cherry-picking the sights, and forever after told people he was truly Egyptian, if not a citizen of the world. In Madrid, de Botton contrasts the Baedeker descriptions of sites with Alexander von Humboldt’s thirty volumes of findings from a five-year exploration of South America, deciding that you need to ask your own questions to find what’s meaningful to you and avoid boredom. The notion that the guidebook’s three-star attraction may not be your piece of cake was particularly liberating for me. As I grow older, I find myself drawn more to the one-star or no-star sites than the three-star blockbusters identified by M. Michelin.

Xavier de Maistre wrote a book entitled Journey Around My Bedroom which inspires de Botton to write “the pleasure we derive from a journey may be dependent more on the mind-set we travel with than on the destination we travel to.” Receptivity is key. De Botton wanders his London neighborhood, trying to dissociate his surroundings from their usual hooks.

Since I’m in Graz, I needn’t look too far to receive new lessons. “Lessons” is an apt word, for many of de Botton’s precepts apply equally well in the meta-learning realm.

Posted by jaycross at July 1, 2003 08:36 PM | TrackBack

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