"Read All About It In The Idler"
4 June 2002
Departure and Return: A Review of
The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton
Where should one chance to first encounter Alain de Botton's latest philosophical excursion, The Art of Travel, but in an airport bookshop?
At five o'clock in the morning at bustling Stansted Airport, near London, The Art of Travel's British list price of 9 pounds 99 pence was higher than airfare from England to Denmark on Ryanair, one of a number of discount European carriers with active names like Go, Buzz, and Easyjet.
De Botton's paperback book, piled high on tables by the cash register, drew attention because of an air travel themed cover, the wingtip of a Jumbo Jet, seen from a window seat at 35,000 feet.
When else, except while travelling, would one find oneself in a bookshop at dawn, looking for readings to distract and perhaps inspire, staring at a photo of a window seat's vantage point? In such a transformed universe, where ancient constraints of time, space --and expense -- seem to have become irrelevant, the cover beckoned "Buy me."
Done.
After passing through several security checkpoints and boarding the plane, one opened the book and read: "for Michele Hutchinson." Though her name is never mentioned again in the text, there follow references to a girlfriend, "M." The same? A mystery that enriches the experience. For one may be reading a letter to a companion, a diary, a book for the general public, or perhaps another genre entirely. At one level, reading The Art of Travel has the thrill of reading someone else's purloined mail.
At once deeply personal and starkly objective, what de Botton attempts is to craft a new kind of self-help manual for the traveller who finds himself, or herself, at the crack of dawn, at a crowded airport, wondering (for any reason at all): "Is this trip really necessary?"
Of course The Art of Travel is not a guidebook in the practical sense, not a Frommer's or a Michelin, or a Lonely Planet, but it is a guidebook in the philosophical sense, in that it serves as a guide for the perplexed, a book to help explain to a weary voyager why waiting for three hours to be scanned, wanded, x-rayed, patted down, quizzed, cross-examined, eyeballed, only to be eventually admitted into a small metal tube that is hurtled into space, to consume reheated unidentifiable pressed vegetable matter in tasteless sauce with plastic forks and knives, should not be seen as a hassle, a worry, or a burden, but rather as a truly privileged experience, travel being transcendental and sublime.
Seen from this perspective, travel is like a mind-altering drug (not for nothing was an LSD experience called an "acid trip"), a vacation an out-of-body experience. One can get out of it a great deal of self-knowledge, as well as knowledge of other places. The trick, as de Botton points out, is "to notice what we have already seen."
Or, pace Ruskin and Proust, de Botton pays attention to the little things, tiny perceptions that on reflection may add up to some very big thing.
It is a truism, yet true, that fresh perspectives from travel stay with one, and the reality of any journey criscrosses with anticipation of a fantasy promised in tourist brochures; as well as remembrance of a voyage memorialized in photographs, journal entries, or sketchbooks. Between apprehension and memory is the trip itself. How to make the most of it is at the base de Botton's brilliant argument.
And after September 11th, with the horror of suicidal hijackers turning airliners into flying bombs that destroyed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon etched in our consciousness, the book is perhaps even more meaningful than de Botton intended when he set pen to paper. Because freedom to travel is one of the most cherished freedoms of a free society. It is not for nothing that totalitarian states ban free movement of their populations. Free societies cherish freedom to just "go."
For the jet aircraft is sign and symbol for de Botton, who describes spending time at Heathrow watching Jumbo Jets take off and land, as is the motorway, fast food, and the automobile, of human freedom, of the ability to escape from one reality into another, to reinvent, transform, and at the same time come into contact with one's more authentic self. In a very real sense, all journeys are journeys of self-discovery, whether circumnavigations of the globe, expeditions to the Orient, or merely, in a charming reference, in a journey around one's bedroom in pyjamas.
Like de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy, this book verges on name-dropping, hanging on musings from selected authorities, incorporating large themes of Departure, Motives, Landscape, Art, and Return; incorporating discussions of Anticipation, Travelling Places, the Exotic, Curiosity, Country & City, the Sublime, Eye-opening Art, Possessing Beauty, and Habit.
For every de Botton essay, there are philosophical guides tied to particular locations: J.K. Huysmans for a trip from Hammersmith to Barbados; Baudelaire and Edward Hopper for experiences of gas stations, airports, planes, and trains; Flaubert linked to Amsterdam and Egypt; Alexander von Humboldt for Madrid; Wordsworth for the Lake District and Wales' Wye Valley; Edmund Burke and the Book of Job for a trip to Mount Sinai; Van Gogh for Provence; and to tie it all together, John Ruskin and Xavier de Maistre.
And as in How Proust Can Change Your Life (these three titles form a trilogy of sorts) there are practical, how-to, elements applying the lofty thoughts and artistic inspirations to seeing, feeling, and touching more deeply than before. Learning to draw, keeping a sketchbook, just remembering, can make all the difference.
In his fifth and perhaps most revelatory chapter, de Botton describes Wordsworth's walk in the Wye Valley after confronting the horrors of the French Terror, suggesting -- as does Simon Schama in his 12th episode of History of Britain, Wordsworth's Nature an alternative to the horrors of Man, what de Botton calls "an ode to the restorative powers of nature."
To make the point, he quotes from Wordsworth's Lines writen a few miles above Tintern Abbey: On revisiting the banks of the Wye during a Tours. July 13, 1798.
Though absent long,
These forms of beauty have not been to me,
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet...
With tranquil restoration.
Coincidentally, this reviewer found himself at Stansted Airport holding this book after completing an eighty-mile walk along the path trod by Wordsworth. Only a few days before, Tintern Abbey stood before one, appearing much as it had in the 19th century. A few days later, a volume picked up at random contained a chapter explaining its significance, an item purchased without realizing the connection (had a picture of Tintern Abbey been on the cover, the book might have remained on the sales table). A few nights after that, one could watch Simon Schama add to this discussion of Wordsworth's walks and English Romanticism on a BBC broadcast.
So, in real life, literary connections of time, place, and personality as imagined, described, and explained by de Botton were quite real, solid, and substantial.
Stream-of-consciousness had joined the stream of life, thanks to travel. And so some other pieces fell into place, realizations that de Botton was dealing with specific questions of identity and history, signified by abstractions and literary references.
The places de Botton visited, beginning with a failed getaway to a Barbados beach resort with the bickering girlfriend from whom he escaped -- a girlfriend who seemed, in a sense to come from another tribe -- were not chosen at random. In a sense, there was a tension between what is English, and what is not. England: the Lake District, Hammersmith, London Docklands, and even Barbados, the most British of the Caribbean islands.
Outside these islands, where did de Botton visit for his book?
France, home to the Enlightenment philosopher Montaigne, one of de Botton's literary ancestors. France, the un-England, as 7-Up is the un-Cola. France, where Van Gogh painted in Provence until he cut off his ear in a fit of madness. Needless to say, Proust's native land (a writer obsessed by the Dreyfus case and Jewish identity).
Holland, home to Spinoza, another Enlightenment luminary, and like de Botton, from a Sephardi refugee family fleeing the Spanish Inquisition.
Spain, from whence the de Bottons came in 1492. Perhaps this is why his most emotionally conflicted sentiments are expressed describing a walking tour of Madrid. (Though he does not go there, de Botton discusses Egypt in relation to Flaubert, curiously linked to a discussion of Amsterdam. Alexandria, Egypt was birthplace of de Botton's father, Swiss financier Gilbert de Botton).
Finally, de Botton travels alone to the Sinai desert, where Moses received the Ten Commandments, redeemed the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, and brought them to the Promised Land.
Exile and return, clear themes of de Botton's narrative, leap out at the reader of his book, at least at 35,000 feet. Think of the Book of Exodus as a form of travel writing, and one begins to understand.
For Botton, travel is not only a journey from somewhere else, it is an opportunity, through the aid of keen perception, sustained attention, as well as reference to literature and philosophy, to explore the deepest reaches of nature, history, and identity.
The art of travel lies in the realization that one is never alone, especially when travelling.
The pictures and text in The Art of Travel serve as a marvellous elaboration of de Botton's keen insight in Chapter One, where, finding himself disgruntled in his Barbados beach hotel, he notes:
"A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making its first appearance: that I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island."
And you, too, can have de Botton's charming and insightful companionship on your next trip, by taking along a copy of The Art of Travel.