The Art of Travel

by Alain de Botton

how we can deepen the value of our voyages’

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside the constraints of work and the struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems – that is, issues requiring thought beyond the practical. We are inundated with advice

on where to travel to; we hear little of why and how we should go – though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia or human flourishing.

anticipated a journey to London and offered in the process an extravagantly pessimistic analysis of the difference between what we imagine of a place and what can occur when we reach it.

However, as the moment to board his train approached, along with the chance to turn dreams of London into reality, Des Esseintes was abruptly overcome with lassitude.

He thought how wearing it would be actually to go to London, how he would have to run to the station, fight for a porter, board the train, endure an unfamiliar bed, stand in queues, feel cold and move his fragile frame around the sights that Baedeker had so tersely described – and thus soil his dreams:

A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making its first appearance: that I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.

At home, I could concentrate on pictures of a hotel room, a beach or a sky and ignore the complex creature in which this observation was taking place and for whom this was only a small part of a larger, more multifaceted task of living.

It seems that, unlike the continuous, enduring contentment that we anticipate, happiness with, and in, a place must be a brief and, at least to the conscious mind, apparently haphazard phenomenon: an interval in which we achieve receptivity to the world around us, in which positive thoughts of past and future coagulate and anxieties are allayed.

But the condition rarely endures for longer than ten minutes. New

patterns of anxiety inevitably form on the horizon of consciousness, like the weather fronts that mass themselves every few days off the western coast of Ireland. The past victory no longer seems so impressive, the future acquires complications and the bea...

It was as if a vital evolutionary advantage had been bestowed centuries ago on those members of

the species who lived in a state of concern about what was to happen next.

In another paradox that Des Esseintes would have appreciated, it seems we may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there.

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.

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If we are surprised by the power of one sulk to destroy the beneficial effects of an entire hotel, it is because we misunderstand what holds up our moods. We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn (after an argument in a raffia bungalow under an azure sky) that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own

underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.

Des Esseintes concluded, in Huysmans’s words, that ‘the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience’.

a place, in the words of the legendary couplet from L’Invitation au voyage, where everything would be ‘ordre et beauté/Luxe, calme et volupté’.

We saw stars And waves; we saw sand too; And, despite many crises and unforeseen disasters We were often bored, just as we are here.

‘Life is a hospital in which every patient is obsessed with changing beds. This one wants to suffer in front of the radiator, and that one thinks he’d get better if he was by the window.’

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Baudelaire honoured reveries of travel as a mark of those noble questing souls whom he described as ‘poets’, who could not be satisfied with the horizons of home even as they appreciated the limits of other lands, whose temperaments oscillated between hope and despair, childlike idealism and cynicism. It was the fate of poets, like Christian pilgrims, to live in a fallen world while refusing to surrender their vision of an alternative, less compromised realm.

Carriage, take me with you! Ship, steal me away from here! Take me far, far away. Here the mud is made of our tears!

‘the poésie des départs, the poésie des salles d’attente.’

And, one might add, the poésie des stations-service and the poésie des aéroports.

Similar sentiments may arise when looking at one of the larger species of aeroplane, it too a ‘vast’ and ‘complicated’ creature which defies its size and the chaos of the lower atmosphere to steer serenely across the firmament.

Then suddenly, accompanied by the controlled rage of the engines (with only a slight tremor from glasses in the galley), we rise fluently into the atmosphere and an immense horizon opens up across which we can wander without impediment. A journey which on earth would have taken an afternoon can be accomplished with an infinitesimal movement of the eye; we can cross Berkshire, visit Maidenhead, skirt over Bracknell and survey the M4.

There is psychological pleasure in this take-off too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives; to imagine that we too might one day surge above much that now looms over us. The new vantage point lends order and logic to the landscape: roads curve to avoid hills, rivers trace paths to lakes, pylons lead from power stations to towns, streets that from earth seemed laid out without thought emerge as well-planned grids. The eye attempts to match what it can see with what the mind knows should be there, like a reader trying to decipher a familiar book in a new language. Those lights must be New-bury, that road the A33 as it leaves the M4. And to think that all along, hidden from our sight, our lives were this small: the world we live in but almost never see; the way we must appear to the hawk and to the gods.

Carriage, take me with you! Ship, steal me away from here! Take me far, far away. Here the mud is made of our tears!

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.

Loneliness is the dominant theme. Hopper’s figures seem far from home; they sit or stand alone, looking at a letter on the edge of a hotel bed or drinking in a bar, they gaze out of the window of a moving train or read a book in a hotel lobby. Their faces are vulnerable and introspective. They have perhaps just left someone or been left; they are in search of work, sex or company, adrift in transient places.

The figures in Hopper’s art are not opponents of home per se, it is simply that, in a variety of undefined ways, home appears to have betrayed them, forcing them out into the night or on to the road. The twenty-four-hour diner, the station waiting room and the motel are sanctuaries for those who have, for noble reasons, failed to find a home in the ordinary world, sanctuaries for those whom Baudelaire might have dignified with the honorific ‘poets’.

a fog from the right of the canvas, a harbinger

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train.

Thinking improves when parts of the mind are given other tasks, are charged with listening to music or following a line of trees. The music or the view distracts for a time that nervous, censorious, practical part of the mind which is inclined to shut down when it notices something difficult emerging in consciousness and which runs scared of memories, longings, introspective or original ideas and prefers instead the administrative and the impersonal. Of all modes of transport, the train is perhaps the best aid to thought: the views have none of the potential monotony of those

It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are. Hotel rooms offer a similar opportunity to escape our habits of mind.

Lying in bed in a hotel, the room quiet except for the occasional swooshing of an elevator in the innards of the building, we can draw a line under what preceded our arrival, we can overfly great and ignored stretches of our experience. We can reflect upon our lives from a height we could not have reached in the midst of everyday business – subtly assisted in this by the unfamiliar world around us: by the small wrapped soaps on the edge of the basin, by the gallery of miniature bottles in the mini-bar, by the room-service menu with its promises of all-night dining and the view on to an unknown city stirring silently twenty-five floors below us.

scruffiness to street furniture; an absence of ostentatious

front door in another country? Why fall in love

houses: ‘There are, besides the windows of lattice-work,

revulsion

auburn

Surveying these, Ralph Waldo Emerson was to write: ‘Humboldt 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 show us the possibilities of the human mind, the force and range of the faculties – a universal man.’

‘1. The knowledge of the earth and its inhabitants. 2. The discovery of the higher laws of nature, which govern the universe, men, animals, plants and minerals. 3. The discovery of new forms of life. 4. The discovery of territories hitherto but imperfectly known, and their various productions. 5. The acquaintance with new species of the human race – their manners, language and historical traces of their culture.’

enhancing’. The term was Nietzsche’s. In the autumn of 1873, Friedrich Nietzsche composed an essay in which he distinguished between collecting facts like an explorer or academic and using already well-known facts for the sake of inner, psychological enrichment. Unusually for a university professor, he denigrated the former activity and praised the latter. Entitling his essay On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, Nietzsche began with the extraordinary assertion that collecting facts in a quasi-scientific way was a sterile pursuit. The real challenge was to use facts to enhance ‘life’. He quoted a sentence from Goethe: ‘I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.’ What would it mean to seek knowledge ‘for life’ from one’s travels? Nietzsche offered suggestions. He imagined a person depressed about the state of German culture and the lack of

invigorating

distinctions were not necessarily false, but their effect was pernicious.

constantly climbing through clouds,’ he reported. ‘In many places,

He was given a library of books about nature, a microscope and tutors who understood botany.

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.