The Art Of Travel by Alain de Botton
(2002)
Recommended by Mark
Hello from LEAGRAVE!
Leagrave sounds
nice, doesn’t it? Perhaps you’re thinking it's a small fishing port on the
west coast of Scotland, or a quaint Cornish hamlet accessible only via a
meandering B road.
It is neither.
It is a soulless Luton suburb, and I am in the bar of a chain hotel, having
paid £3.80 for an indifferent (small) glass of red wine and a flickering internet
connection.
I’m not finding
much artistry in this particular travel experience.
I know that a
lot of people don’t like Alain de Botton. His detractors see him as some kind
of intellectual parasite who condenses and over-simplifies the ideas of eminent
minds for the lumpen proletariat. He doesn’t do much to deflect this reputation.
Look at this recent article, 'Ten Commandments for Atheists': who’d ever have
thought that being polite was a nice thing to do? Thanks, Alain!
However, I’ve
never personally read any of his work; and I do know that de Botton’s recommender
Mark needs no commandments (from de Botton or anyone else) to be polite,
empathetic or funny. He is one of the two people I’ve known longest on this
list. I find that quite upsetting; only two
people from my home city that I wanted to get something as simple as a book
recommendation from. (Well, there were three, but one didn’t recommend).
Mark used to work
on Saturdays at the bread shop down the road (note, ‘bread shop’, that’s the Norwich
way. ‘Bakeries’ are for people from Guildford). He was a little bit older, he
was in a band, he went to indie gigs at the UEA. I was a young teen, with puppy
fat and emotions written all over my face. I loved talking to him, and of course I had a little crush on him. It was one of those early pure crushes:
he was way above me and there was no hope of fulfillment, and that was its
point. Given that my next crush was to be serious, complex and painful, well, I
appreciate those innocent earlier feelings even more.
He even got on
TV! Look at this (Mark’s the guitarist with the Mr. Bubbles (??) t-shirt):
He left school, and
left the bread shop; eventually he left Norwich too, and went on to have lovely
children and a gorgeous wife. It was ace to
get back in touch a few years ago, and particularly ace to know that he still
made music. Now Mark is better known as the subtle and brilliant electronic pop project Mono Life.
Anyway: the past
is another country. Here I am, in the Leagrave present with Mr. de Botton. Can
he help me find the pearls among the suburban swine?
The Art Of Travel encourages
reflection. Why go away in the first
place, and how might we get the best
from travel? Too often, de Botton says, we simply assume we’ll have a good time
on our holidays, and we don’t. He relates his experience of Barbados.
My body and mind
were to prove temperamental accomplices in the mission of appreciating my
destination. The body found it hard to sleep, it complained of heat, flies and
difficulties digesting hotel meals. The mind meanwhile revealed a commitment to
anxiety, boredom, free-floating sadness and financial alarm.
He’s in Barbados
and I am in Leagrave. It’s tempting to shout: down a couple of rums, and shut up.
But de Botton’s
point is important (even if he expresses it in an irritating manner). We want
travel and holiday to be entirely transcendental, to take us away from our
problems and our normal selves. When we find our normal selves along for the
ride – and usually our problems don’t take the hint to stay at home either – it
doesn’t matter what the surroundings are.
How do we square
this particular circle? De Botton ‘asks’ artists, writers and thinkers. He
surveys how great men (and it is only
men that de Botton consults) have looked at the foreign and the native alike,
and then connects their words and art with various aspects of the travel
experience: anticipation, arrival, sightseeing, return. When de Botton
concentrates on those he admires, his style transforms. He no longer moans
about non-existent problems. He’s enthusiastic about the ideas of those he
writes of, and wants his readers to be so, too. It doesn’t come across as
cynical or exploitative. And far from being obvious, de Botton uses a wide
variety of carefully chosen source material: he’ll quote from correspondence, speeches
and minor works as well as the well-known.
If it is de Botton’s
aim to open up minds, then I have two words for you: Gustave Flaubert.
The chapter ‘On
The Exotic’, where de Botton discusses the work of Flaubert – in particular, Flaubert’s
ambivalence towards France and his attraction to the Middle East – left me
wanting to abandon the rest of the Two
Readers project and immediately read every scribble Flaubert has ever
written. How, how, have I never read
this man before? My God! He’s hardly Johnny Nobody. On the basis of the
material in The Art Of Travel, Flaubert
could easily be my favourite all-time writer.
My life, which I
dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love, will turn
out to be like everyone else’s – monotonous, sensible, stupid.
(Letter to schoolfriend)
I was really taken,
not only with Flaubert’s style, but also with his more general thoughts on
life. And this is where credit must go to de Botton for interpreting them in an
attention-grabbing and direct way.
[Flaubert]
proposed a new way of ascribing nationality: not according to the country one
was born in or to which one’s family belonged, but according to the places to
which one was attracted. It was only logical for him to extend this more
flexible concept of identity to gender and species and for him to declare on
occasion that, contrary to appearances, he was in truth a woman, a camel, and a
bear.
I’ve Madame Bovary sitting on my shelf at
home. I’m now so anxious to read it that I’m physically shaking with
excitement.
The other ‘guide’
de Botton follows who especially affected me was John Ruskin. The fearlessly
sharp tongue this man had! This from his speech to a group of wealthy holidaymakers
in 1864:
The Alps
themselves you look upon as soaped poles in a bear-garden, which you set
yourselves to climb, and slide down again, with ‘shrieks of delight’.
Ruskin was not just
being obnoxious (although he clearly relished being so). He was keen to shake
people from their apathy, to get them to really, truly, see – not to merely glance, and not to simply understand things as they
related to their own egos. And this is what de Botton is trying to do, too; he
ends the book by travelling ‘at home’: around Hammersmith, peering at
gravy adverts and nosing into office windows.
So let’s have
another look at Leagrave.
Nope.
But I’ll have
another glass of wine, and shut up.
