The Art Of Travel - Alain De Botton

 THE ART OF TRAVEL - ALAIN DE BOTTON

Firstly, what exactly does it mean to 'travel' and what exactly is the art of it? As Alain De Botton points out in his book The Art Of Travel, if you say 'He journeyed through the afternoon' it's never quite as simple as that. It's never a straight, uncomplicated going from A to B, from one place to another. It's all the things in-between, all the unacknowledged if even tedious things that are done along the way whether it be on foot, by car, train or aeroplane. It's the showing of tickets or passports, the stopping off for a rest, a snack or for the toilet. It's the swatting away of a fly, an irritable itch, the sighting if even only briefly of faces and objects. Cursory glances, fleeting comments during brief encounters, and no end of thoughts, dreams and reveries passing through your head.

Then when you arrive at your destination, what is so very different about it from where you have left? Is it all just a shuffling of chairs, a movement of furniture and a change of temperature? As again De Botton points out when describing a holiday to Bermuda: 'I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.'

I'm not sure if it's still the same nowadays but when at the age of seventeen I set off on a trip around Europe and then down to Greece (a country then considered to be the half-way stop between the West and the East more than being European) it was whilst living on the island of Crete that I first came upon the notion that there was a difference between a traveller and a tourist. A tourist would typically have a date in mind as to when they'll be returning home, whilst a traveller had no such date and often no home to even return to. Would De Botton be aware of such a difference?

Alain De Botton is very well read and what he does in The Art Of Travel is to write about such people as John Ruskin, van Gogh, Wordsworth, Flaubert, Edward Hopper and Baudelaire in regard to their thoughts and relationships to travelling and then he applies his own thoughts and experiences to it. It's all good stuff without any question but there seems to be a certain element missing from it all and that's the lived experience of being a traveller rather than a tourist.

Has De Botton ever hung out with the hippies of Katmandu, or slept in the caves at Matala, or pitched up in Amsterdam looking for a squat to stay at with just the hope that it won't be too drug-devastated? Of course he hasn't. Not that there's any intrinsic value in these experiences but when you're writing about travelling rather than cheap holidays in other peoples misery then it probably counts for something at that point if no other.

De Botton has a background of wealth and privilege behind him alongside a healthy trust fund which means most of his life would have been a physically comfortable one. This doesn't of course make him exempt from having inner demons, in fact it's pretty apparent he has an abundance of them although one advantage of this is that they drive his writing. They're the engine behind his curiosity of the kind that gives him cause to wonder why he has a fascination with service stations, motels and airports? He finds an answer in the paintings of Edward Hopper. Why does the idea of travelling appeal? He finds an answer in Gaustave Flaubert. Apart from inner demons, what drives a curiosity about other places? He finds an answer in Alexander von Humboldlt.

A good education gives access to the art and the writings of such people whom De Botton discusses. A good education points you in the direction of where to look to both enhance or satisfy a curiosity. For those without that privilege, however, there is but the public library of old (or nowadays in more likelihood the Internet) and maybe a weeks holiday in Majorca to explore the world, sold by a picture seen in a brochure or on a web page of a palm tree on a beach. Or else there's the option of simply throwing yourself into the world to see what happens when you land. If you ever actually do land?

On reading The Art Of Travel, 'throwing yourself into the world' is something that may well have benefitted Alain De Botton far more than all the books he has read and all the paintings viewed. Or better still, to have combined both: For him to be well-educated, well-read and then to throw himself into the world with abandon. Letting go of his security and his metaphorical lifeboats. To sink or swim.

The Art Of Travel is a decent enough read but it's scraping the bottom of the barrel pickings when it comes to philosophical insights - and philosophy  is meant to be De Botton's forte. It's an assemblage of notions that aren't particularly earth-shattering, hung out and strung together between musings from various writers and poets and De Botton's interpretations of them in relationship to his own life. If travel is meant to broaden the mind then either De Brotten isn't doing enough of it or he's doing the wrong kind.

I'd suggest it was the latter and that he needs to shake off all this jetting off to the Sinai desert 'in order to be made to feel small', or driving down to Provence to spend a few days with friends in a farmhouse because he's not really getting much out of it when it comes to validity. Instead he should perhaps try a bit of hitch hiking, navigating the sexual advances of hairy lorry drivers and spending a few nights sleeping under hedges after nobody cares to stop to give him a lift when standing at the edge of a road at midnight. That would give him something to write home about, for sure.

John Serpico