True, perhaps, but as de Bottons book makes quite clear, being with your own thoughts is not always conducive to rewarding travel experiences. In a section on a trip he took to Madrid "On Curiosity" de Botton fixates on his own shortcomings as a traveler, comparing himself (unfavorably) with the 19th-century German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, whose journeys through South America contributed to our understanding of geology, geography, botany, anthropology, and meteorology. While Humboldt was driven by an endless hunger for knowledge, de Botton finds his own appetite dulled by a steady diet of guidebooks. "[I]n Madrid," he complains, "everything was already known; everything had already been measured." He ends up standing on a corner asking himself, "What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?"
Again and again, de Botton resorts to this plaintive, self-deprecating tone. He is, by his own admission, the kind of person who is happier reading about the world than being in it. On a trip to the Sinai Desert, where he has trekked in order to get a sense of the sublime, he writes, "In my backpack, I am carrying a torch, a sun hat and Edmund Burke." Timid, easily bored, and preoccupied with minor irritations, de Botton often seems unable to enjoy himself no matter where he is. If The Art of Travel is a self-help book or at least a guide to better living then it seems the person de Botton is setting out to help is himself.
"I think all my books have been attempts to help me," he says. "Thats where I start from. I dont have any John-the-Baptist desire to convert others. If I manage to elucidate something for other people, thats great, but I dont set out to do that. All of my books spring from personal problems, and this book sprung up from the personal problem of not looking around enough. I guess I felt Id kept my eyes down in books for too long."
Even so, de Botton who describes himself as an "egghead" cannot resist inviting a cortege of cultural icons Edmund Burke, Flaubert, Van Gogh, John Ruskin along for the ride. And, while using the works of his chosen figures to shed light on the art of travel, he uses travel as a basis for exploring the works of these figures. As a result, the journeys in the book are as often intellectual as they are physical. Which isnt as dry as it sounds.
While The Art of Travel includes a long, thoughtful section on the poet William Wordsworths love of nature, for instance, it also includes a section titled, "The exoticism of shitting donkeys." And de Botton takes great pains to tackle even the knottiest topics with plain, straightforward language. 'What defies our will can provoke anger and resentment, but it may also arouse awe and respect," he writes in an effort to explain the nature of the sublime. "It depends whether the obstacle appears noble in its defiance or squalid and insolent. We begrudge the defiance of a cocky doorman even as we honor that of the mist-shrouded mountain."
Though a self-confessed lover of philosophy, de Botton has no time for convoluted, arcane philosophical writing. "Most philosophy books you read, you think, 'Is this a human, or is this being written by a computer?'" he says. "When you read Jean Paul Sartre writing about how to remain authentic in the modern world, you get five paragraphs into it and you think, Come on, he hasnt done the work; he hasnt sat down and thought, "What am I trying to say here?" Or, more insidiously, hes thought that its rather fun to confuse everybody.'"
Meanwhile, de Bottons efforts to make his work accessible have led some critics to accuse him of dumbing-down his topics. "What I come up against from certain quarters," he says, "is, 'Oh, this guys not clever. Hes actually really stupid, because he keeps saying these things that are so obvious, everyone knows that.' And thats the danger you run into. But Im always weirdly flattered by that accusation. Id be much more devastated by someone who said my works just not very interesting." He adds, sounding less blithe, "There was a review [of The Art of Travel] in the New York Times today that was absolutely terrible." For a few minutes after this announcement, de Bottons salad Nioise goes untouched.
And de Botton has good reason to be unnerved. The review, by none other than Times heavy hitter Michiko Kakutani, was the critical equivalent of assault and battery. Kakutani started out calling the book "a glib recycling of others thoughts and observations," and continued that "the author ... succeeds in making himself sound like a petulant, lazy and self-involved philistine," before rounding off her attack with: "The generalizations in this book that arent obvious tend to be dubious or just plain stupid.
Kakutanis critical credentials aside, shes wrong. The Art of Travel is a wonderful book: inventive, witty, intelligent, and beautifully written. At its best, its prose achieves the intensity of aphorism a fact that is snidely referred to by Kakutani, who remarks that de Botton is often "trite in a quote-book sort of way." While many of de Bottons observations may not bear the mark of irrefutable logic "[I]t seems we may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there"; "What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home" they are nonetheless provocative and insightful. As every good aphorist knows, something can be true without being correct.
Perhaps the biggest falsehood contained in the Art of Travel, the biggest whopper, is de Bottons portrayal of himself as a poor observer. The book is teeming with tantalizing detail, from a storm cloud with "an almost decadent orange glow, making it look like a grave old man bedecked with party decorations," to a cypress tree that "takes on the appearance of a flame flickering nervously in the wind." Even the dubious charms of a highway rest stop cannot escape the authors gaze:
Overlooking the motorway between London and Manchester, in a flat, featureless expanse of country, stands a single-storey glass-and-redbrick service station. In its forecourt hangs a giant laminated flag that advertises to motorists and to the sheep in an adjacent field a photograph of a fried egg, two sausages and a peninsula of baked beans....
But then its possible that there is a paradox at work here, that in the process of writing The Art of Travel, de Botton learned to take his eyes off of the page long enough to take stock of his surroundings. In the last section of the book, de Botton returns once more to his home in West London. "I tried to reverse the process of habituation," he writes, "to dissociate my surroundings from the uses I had previously found for them. I forced myself to obey a strange sort of mental command: I was to look around me as though I had never been in this place before."
Since finishing his book, de Botton has been more inclined to stand about staring at things traffic lights, storefronts, caterpillars, clouds. His friends, he says, are finally getting used to the habit. "Ive learned to say that Im going to stop here and look at the sky, that Id like to be left alone to look at the sky for a half-hour, and to be unashamed about it," he says. "People go, 'Oh, all right, weirdo,' but Ive got a lot more license to do that now."
And de Botton would hope that we, having read his book, might take the time to stop and admire the odd traffic light ourselves. "There should be a policeman in front of every travel agent saying, 'Okay, you can buy a ticket, but first go check out your own city.'" For his part, meanwhile, de Botton expects his book-tour responsibilities will preclude any local sightseeing. "Ive traveled across the Atlantic," he says. "Im in Boston, yet Im not going to see anything. Its horrific."
Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com
The art of travel (continued)