When asked where he came from, Socrates answered, not ‘From Athens’ but ‘From the World.’ The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton is a wittily crafted book drawing on the theories and bons mots of writers, explorers, philosophers, and artists. It’s like a simple guidebook about how to travel well and become better travelers.
De Botton illustrated the two types of travelers those that see the world with awe and wonder, those who travel to expand their perspectives of the world, and those who pay keen attention to details, details our world has to offer, be it nature, animals, scenery, architecture, how the sun sets and rises in different places of the world – the marvelous beauty of our planet and all its organisms. Those who ask vigorously, questions are motivated by being in search of an authentic representation of experiences.
And then there are the pessimistic types of travelers – those from the pessimistic school who only see disappointments in every reality or experience. No better explanation of the pessimistic traveler than in J. K. Huysman’s novel A Rebours, published in 1884, whose effete and misanthropic hero, was the aristocratic Duc des Esseintes, who also happens to be an honorary patron of the pessimistic school of travel. The type that even in the most fascinating cities, have occasionally been visited by a strong wish to remain in bed and take the next flight home. One question revolves around the relationship between the anticipation of travel and its reality and we are familiar with the notion that the reality of travel is not what we anticipate. The pessimistic school, of which des Esseintes might be an honorary patron, therefore argues that reality must always be disappointing. We can also agree that no two realities are alike and a pessimist will have a different reality of a situation compared to an optimist.
If there is anything about our lives that we know to be true is that our lives are transient. Hence, as we exist for just a temporary period of time, we might as well embark on experiences that make life meaningful and fulfilling – travel gives us both. If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest—in all its ardor and paradoxes—than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside of the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems—that is issues requiring thought beyond the practical. We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems natural to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or ‘human flourishing.’ The Art of Travel is a perfect guide to intelligent travel. Where we go, de Botton argues convincingly is far less important than an awareness of why we are on the move at all. “At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves – that is brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we 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, but who may not be who we essentially are.” Part of growing, and learning to travel well, means daring to take our own interests a bit more seriously. And so by attuning to the needs of our inner self, traveling to places that would fundamentally reorient our personality we realize that travel is so much more rewarding to our overall being than otherwise. With travel, we can embark on journeys that could also assist us with our inner journeys.
In habit, the final chapter, de Botton argued that “our responses to the world are crucially molded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit with the expectations of others.” This is triggered by not having a mind of your own and there is no one to blame for that but ourselves. If you are traveling this summer, try and find poetry in the service station and the hotel or Airbnb or motel, the busy airport or train carriage, the busy markets, notice how different things you are not used to connecting or simply observe and hopefully, we realize that there is so much beauty, inspiration, and so much we can learn from others especially people different from us. We may implicitly find that we are in fact never alone in this vast expanse of the universe.
