The Art of Travel

I'm not generally that into the Ted Talks, but a while back I came across one by philosopher Alain de Botton on the meaning of success.  One point that has stood out in my memory was his observation that the same people who society considered "unfortunates" in the ancient through early modern world are today called "losers", signifying a shift in how we assign responsibility for lack of success: once it was ascribed to forces beyond human control, but now it implies innate worthlessness.  Overall I was interested in his mode of address and his ideas, so I put some of his books, especially Status Anxiety, on my to-read list.  Then I saw that he'd written an a book entitled The Art of Travel, in the introduction to which he notes that despite all of the massive literature on where to go, there's very little written on why we go, or what we hope to gain from it.  There are a number of thematic essays in the book, each interspersing a personal journey of his own with the ideas of a "guide", among which are found Wordsworth, the naturalist Alexander van Humboldt, van Gogh, and Flaubert.  I found his many of his observations fascinating and on-point, but when I tried to share some of them with Sean, he was turned off by what seemed to him their "obviousness." (I later learned from his Wikipedia page that this division of opinions on his work is fairly standard!)

Here are some of the things that struck me:

• On travel in real life vs. travel as it's presented in art: "A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon.'  We sit in a train.  Lunch digests awkwardly within us.  The seat cloth is grey.  We look at the window at a field.  We look back in side...It starts to rain.  A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be [this goes on for an entire paragraph!].  A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening.  Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetitions, misleading emphases and inconsequential plotlines."  [Sean: So what?  Of course an author isn't going to write all that stuff, it'd be boring.  Me: But isn't it interesting to think about all the stuff they leave out?  Sean: No, because it's boring.]
• After reflecting on train travel as conducive to contemplative thought: "Journeys are the midwives of thought...At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves--that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us.  It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves.  The furniture insists that we cannot change because it cannot; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are."
• On our delight with points of difference in other cultures and places, whether an airport sign or a jam jar: "Yet difference alone would not be enough to elicit pleasure, or not for long.  The difference has to seem like an improvement on what my own country is capable of...what we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home."
• From a letter by Flaubert, on his deep hatred of his home country and the notion of national identities: "I'm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country--that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black--has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid.  I am a soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man."
• On his lifelong passion for the East, which resulted in a 9-month stay in Egypt that would remain with him for the rest of his life: "Why did Flaubert so admire the camel?  Because he identified with its stoicism and ungainliness.  He was touched by its sad expression and its combination of awkwardness and fatalistic resilience.  The people of Egypt seemed to share some of the camel's qualities, exhibiting a silent strength and humility that contrasted with the bourgeois arrogance of Flaubert's own Norman neighbors."
• On the need for curiosity when we travel, particularly a curiosity about something in particular that has had time to develop: "A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to built up the necessary receptivity...the risk is compounded by geography, in the way that cities contain buildings or monuments that may be only a few feet apart in space but are leagues apart in terms of what is required to appreciate them...We are asked to be curious about Gothic architecture on one street and then fascinated by Etruscan archaeology on the next."
• On the travels of Alexander von Humboldt, who traveled to the still virtually-unknown continent of South America and returned to Europe with vast data sets about its geography, ethnography, biology, climate, etc.: an early biography of him was subtitled What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime--to which de Botton adds, "and seldom or never is."
• On Wordsworth's belief in the harmful effects of cities on the human soul: "The poet accused cities of fostering a family of life-destroying emotions: anxiety about our position in the social hierarchy, envy at the success of others, pride and a desire to shine in the eyes of strangers...however well-provided for, they had a relentless desire for new things, which they did not genuinely lack and on which their happiness did not depend."
• On the emergence of the concept of the sublime with the Romanticists: "A landscape cold arouse the sublime only when it suggested power--a power greater than that of humans, and threatening to them.  Sublime places embodied a defiance to man's will...It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.  It is as if these landscapes allowed travellers to experience transcendent feelings that they no longer felt in cities and the cultivated countryside."
• Ruskin's words to the Working Men's College, where he was teaching drawing with the goal of teaching people to observe the world more closely: "Now, remember, gentlemen, that I have not been teaching you to draw, only to see.  Two men are walking through Clare Market.  One of them comes out at the other end not a bit wiser than when he went into; the other notices a bit of parsely hanging over the edge of a butter-woman's basket, and carries away with him images of beauty which in the course of his daily work he incorporates with it for many a day.  I want you to see things like these..."

Commonplace some of these points might be, but I enjoyed reflecting on them in light of our travels, and especially on the eve of our next journey through France.  I especially enjoyed the chapter on "Eye-Opening Art", in which he explores how his original lackluster impression of Provence was changed through his experience of van Gogh (thanks to a charismatic PhD student leading a van Gogh tour in Arles, naturally!). His distaste for the low, gnarled forms of the grapevines amused me, because I had something of a similar experience.  The school in Florence had arranged for a Chianti tour, and when we arrived in the vineyard I was shocked to to that those ugly, stooped plants, which I had seen in innumerable fields out the windows of trains as we traveled around Italy, were really grapevines...to think I didn't even like wine back then.  Oh, 2006, how distant you seem!