The Art of Travel

by Alain de Botton

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.

Note to self: Thats why a developed country wont automatically make you happy.

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

Why did the chaos, the richness, so touch Flaubert? Because of his belief that life is fundamentally chaotic and that, aside from art, attempts to create order imply a censorious and prudish denial of our condition.

True