The Art of Travel

by Alain de Botton

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.

Looking back on Wordsworth’s early poems, Coleridge would assert that their genius had been to: give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

But biblical history only serves to reinforce an impression that would anyway have occurred to a traveller encamped in the Sinai: an impression that some intentional being must have had a hand in this, something greater than man and with an intelligence that mere ‘nature’ does not possess; a ‘something’ for which the word God still seems, even to the secular mind, a far from unlikely appellation.

Early writers on the sublime repeatedly connected sublime landscapes with religion: Joseph Addison, On the Pleasures of the Imagination, 1712: ‘A vast space naturally raises in my thoughts the idea of an Almighty Being.’ Thomas Gray, Letters, 1739: ‘There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief without the help of any other argument.’ Thomas Cole, Essay on American Scenery, 1835: ‘Amid those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, the associations are of God the creator – they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836: ‘The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.’

Asked to explain to Job why he has been made to suffer though he has been good, God draws Job’s attention to the mighty phenomena of nature. Do not be surprised that things have not gone your way: the universe is greater than you. Do not be surprised that you do not understand why they have not gone your way: for you cannot fathom the logic of the universe. See how small you are next to the mountains. Accept what is bigger than you and you do not understand. The world may appear illogical to Job, but it does not follow that it is illogical per se. Our lives are not the measure of all things: consider sublime places for a reminder of human insignificance and frailty.

From his interest in beauty and in its possession, Ruskin arrived at five central conclusions. Firstly, that beauty is the result of a complex number of factors that affect the mind psychologically and visually. Secondly, that humans have an innate tendency to respond to beauty and to desire to possess it. Thirdly, that there are many lower expressions of this desire for possession, including the desire to buy souvenirs and carpets, to carve one’s name in pillars and to take photographs. Fourthly, that there is only one way to possess beauty properly and that is through understanding it, through making ourselves conscious of the factors (psychological and visual) that are responsible for it. And lastly, that the most effective way of pursuing this conscious understanding is by attempting to describe beautiful places through art, through writing or drawing them, irrespective of whether we happen to have any talent for doing so.

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. In the process of re-creating with our own hand what lies before our eyes, we seem naturally to move from a position of observing beauty in a loose way to one where we acquire a deep understanding of its constituent parts and hence more secure memories of it.

I had seen many oak trees in my life, but only after an hour spent drawing one in the Langdale valley (the result would have shamed an infant) did I begin to appreciate, and remember, their identity.