By the time I read Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel I had already seen most of the fifty United States, visited more than a dozen countries and even lived abroad for a couple years. In all those places, and while moving between them, I had a lot of time to think about how and why I felt this urge to see the world.
The ideas in de Botton’s book gave additional nuance to some of my conclusions, caused me to reconsider others, and to re-imagine the act of travel and motion, of physical and cultural transposition, as an act of creativity — an artistic endeavor.
While his book is ostensibly about travel, there are a number of ideas contained in it that speak directly to living a creative life. Here’s a brief look at three.
Transformation and Return
There is an abrupt and inescapable challenge that is familiar to both mystics and creators: to return from the transcendent to the mundane, while maintaining one’s enthusiasm and clarity of purpose. If we are working deeply in ideas that matter, we will be changed by the experience, yet we must then re-enter a world that is unchanged and indifferent until we figure out how to share that experience.
de Botton reflects on this after returning from a trip:
“It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we are essentially are.”
Or who we aspire to be. The friction of our surroundings can keep us from wild excursions and ill-advised adventures. But it can also constrain our growth, our sense of self, and scuttle our attempts at self-definition and re-invention.
Yawning at the Unthinkable
In 2008, flying is a routine part of life in the developed world. Over the years, there have been many flights during which I’ve buried my head in a magazine or a book before takeoff, and not noticed much else until the plane was on the ground, a time zone or two away.
But de Botton reminds us what we are missing on such flights:
“In the cabin, no one stands up to announce with the requisite emphasis that if we look out the window, we will see that we are flying over a cloud, a matter that would have detained Leonardo and Poussin, Claude and Constable.”
For most of human history, the distance and difficulty of getting a close look at a mountain peak has made it a rare experience, one that had to be earned by great risk and extreme discomfort. Shouldn’t we be be almost embarrassed that today we can glance out a window, look down on a snow-capped peak, and then close our eyes again, begrudging our inability to fall asleep easily?
Wonder doesn’t require mountains or stars on a moonless night, so much as it requires our attention.
The Mind-set of Travel
Our travel experiences depend on both our attitude and the places we visit. Could it be that physical motion is not required to have the experience of travel? Could we bypass the hassles of the road entirely, and still increase the intensity of our lives by applying a traveler’s mentality to our own surroundings?
The most local form of this idea would be to observe our own room as though it was an unfamiliar and unstudied place, as Xavier de Maistre did in his book “Journey around My Bedroom”.
de Botton summarizes one of de Maistre’s insights:
“…the pleasure we derive from a journey may be dependent more on the mind-set we travel with than on the destination we travel to. If only we could apply a travelling mind-set to our own locales, we might find these places becoming no less interesting than, say, the high mountain passes and butterfly-filled jungles of Humboldt’s South America.”
Travel is a way to develop our perceptive skills, and these skills are the best kind of souvenir: they require no extra space in the luggage, and can be put to use daily after we return.
“Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value. A row of shops that I had always known as one large, undifferentiated, reddish block acquired an architectural identity. There were Georgian pillars around one flower shop, and late-Victorian Gothic-style gargoyles on top of the butcher’s. A restaurant became filled with diners rather than shapes. In a glass-fronted office block, people were gesticulating in a boardroom on the first floor as someone drew a pie chart on an overhead projector. Just across the road from the office, a man was pouring out new slabs of concrete for the pavement and carefully shaping their edges. I boarded a bus and, instead of slipping at once into private concerns, tried to connect imaginatively with the other passengers.”
Travel is not only about where we go, but who we might become, and the details we notice along the way.
