The art of travel - Alain de Botton

Since travel is dicey in the days of the pandemic, I read about traveling, and who better to put me out of my misery than Alain himself. If you have never read him or heard him, give it a try, he is good. Start with 'religion for atheists', then work you way through 'the pleasures and sorrows of work' and finally land on this one. His books are around and about philosophy, everyday living and everything else a mildly 'thinking' person would ponder about while puttering around in the lockdown.

All the ones I read are essay style including this one.

The format of the essays in this book contain the following frames (of reference) - a 'feeling' that traveling usually generates, Botton's travel that is connected to that feeling, a famous author/painter/thinker (recent and/or ancient) who has written about either the place Botton's talking about or the 'feeling'.

Let me walk through an essay.

On anticipation - the first essay.

In this essay he is in Barbados, willing himself to enjoy the postcard perfect scenery with his girlfriend who he is not in sync with during the trip. He talks about how anticipation creates a different mood and reality never usually matches up with it. And the brain is doing its best to make you feel better by padding it up with images and thoughts that will help you match the anticipation. What will be (thought) | what is (reality) | forced or felt? Beauty of it is you will never know till you get there!

The writer he brings into this is J.K. Huysmans, who has written a novel about a man who lives in Paris and really wants to visit London. He reads about it voraciously and finally buys a ticket to make his visit. Right before his trip he visits an english pub, buys an english newspaper, eats english food etc to prep himself but as the time nears, he starts to mull - the train ride will be so tiring, the effort is so much, I have to deal with this, that and the other. He cancels his ticket and goes home. The novel is called À Rebours.

If Alain got in a book and an author, here’s my two cent of a connect.

Daniel Gilbert in his book, 'Stumbling on Happiness' writes about this exact phenomena and a lot about the part of the brain that is responsible for it. He says that 'the frontal lobe is responsible for planning and anxiety — two key future-oriented functions'. I read this book a long while ago - actually on a trip to Sri Lanka in 2008! It truly stayed with me. He shed a floodlight on how common what I felt was - losing interest or adding anxiety to a trip that when planned was filled with excitement and anticipation. Yeah, this was me then and still a bit now. I think I am better at managing anticipation and anxiety or maybe I just don’t resist it and that makes dealing with it easier. What we think of (past or present) today is coloured by today - Gilbert’s hypothesis is fascinating on how that comes in the way of happiness.

This is pretty much the format, will give you only a glimpse of the other 'feelings' around travel so there is some mystery left when you read it.

on traveling places - the places you travel from and to - the bridge that connects you the traveller to the world - petrol stations, planes, trains, airports, you get the drift. Here he brings in Charles Baudelaire ( a writer/poet who loved the idea of travelling in ships but got the captain to turn back as he hated the actual travelling part) and Edward Hopper ( the painter who painted travelling places, check him out).

on the exotic - Alain’s visit to Amsterdam and Flaubert’s obsession of Egypt (the orient as he called it). ‘What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home'. As we get close, clarity is arrived at and the exotic becomes the unfamiliar and eventually undealable; and eventually we just want to go home.

on curiosity - Alain’s travel to Madrid, a place he goes for a conference and Humboldt whose curiosity to understand things up close and in detail gave a lot of valuable information/data to science. Alain actually doesn't feel like leaving his room when he gets to Madrid, the maids in his hotel keep coming in and to avoid them he steps out. He experiments with Humboldt's curiosity bent as he examines some famous places closely, to see if he can add pertinent information to the guide books of Madrid that are are already full of facts and details. He also alludes to the nature of inquiry, we must be ready for what we are about to receive. The place will give you what to need when you are ready, sounds familiar, doesn't it.

’Discoveries made in travels have to be life-enhancing for us’. Nietzsche. This essay is all about the pressure we put on ourselves to make travel more meaningful? Do we do that? Nah.

on the country and the city - this is real and present. Currently what I would give to change places with someone in the country, to stare into empty fields, hillocks, etc. Here he documents his travels to the Lake District and Wordsworth’s poetry on nature and the countryside. He asks, ‘does a city (because of its close proximity to others) bring out our baser instincts than when we are in the midst of nature’?

on the sublime - his travels to the Sinai desert and he talks about being in awe of nature‘s ‘largeness’ and its subliminal elements all the while referencing Edmund Burke and God (through Job). We come closest to God when we see the ‘massiveness‘ of nature. Something that is much more overwhelming than our overwhelming lives. Amen.

on eye opening art - his trip to Provence and Van Gogh. I like Van Gogh ( not saying to sound cool) but there is something to his work that only I see and understand. What? Isn’t that what art should do?

‘Artists choose what aspects of reality they want to keep and what they want to leave out’. Nietzsche. The truth is there but not really there. But it’s not a lie. The world when it sees the truth either feels let down by the ‘there not there’ truth or is in awe of the perspective that is brought alive.

on beauty - all the above mentioned places through the lens of John Ruskin who famously offered drawing classes to the peasants (it is an offensive word, isn't it) in the 19th century. His premise being that when you draw and paint you look closely and pay attention to the world around you.

Alain talks about the disservice the camera does to the act of seeing and observing versus the depth that sketching and word painting provide to the same act. ‘Draw to love nature not to look at nature to learn to draw’.

Last one.

on habit - here he brings in Maistre whose book ‘journey around my bedroom' created quite the stir. Miastre who had traveled extensively during his military career wrote a poignantly beautiful book about his bedroom - space, furniture, his things, it’s orientation etc. He highlights that the mind is more important to appreciate travel rather than the place.

Which is what many of us have come to appreciate during this pandemic.

Does it have to be beautiful sunsets in exotic places, can’t it be the sun going down behind the uneven buildings of our neighbourhood (if that’s what our view is)? Does it have to be the birds of paradise or can it not be the daily habits of the the birds of our neighbourhood?

For a whole year now I have kept an eye on one Randy pigeon, two barbets, many parakeets, 2-3 black crows, 2 vagabond mynahs, a family of hawks. They live in my neighbourhood, its home for them too. It never registered in my brain. I know where their nests are, what perches they fight for, when it’s mating season ( and in the pigeon world, no means no!) and so much more. I spend a max of an hour outside, watching and thinking. Got to see what I only knew theoretically. This wasn't a planned or thought through endeavour, it started because I had nothing to do and nowhere to be. Once I started noticing patterns and recognising the birds it became deliberate.

‘The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room. We are all too busy to be happy’. Blaise Pascal.