The Art of Travel

by Alain de Botton

The destination was not really the point. The true desire was to get away, to go, as he concluded, ‘Anywhere! Anywhere! So long as it is out of the world!’

Tell me, whom do you love most, you enigmatic man: your father, your mother, your sister or your brother? I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother. Your friends? You ‘re using a word I’ve never understood. Your country? I don’t know where that might lie. Beauty? I would love her with all my heart, if only she were a goddess and immortal. Money? I hate it as you hate God. Well then, what do you love, you strange outsider? I love the clouds … the clouds that pass by … over there … over there … those lovely clouds!

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

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

Central to Flaubert’s philosophy was the belief that we are not simply spiritual creatures, but also pissing and shitting ones and that we should integrate the ramifications of this blunt idea into our view of the world.

Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.

‘I could pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colours of my carpet – examining the knots in the wood of the floor, or counting the bricks in the opposite houses with rapturous intervals of excitement.’

If drawing had value even when it was practised by people with no talent, it was for Ruskin because drawing could teach us to see: to notice rather than to look.

When we observe how some people know how to manage their experiences – their insignificant, everyday experiences – so that they become an arable soil that bears fruit three times a year, while others – and how many there are! – are driven through surging waves of destiny, the most multifarious currents of the times and the nations, and yet always remain on top, bobbing like a cork, then we are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much.