“There are in our existence spots of time…”

I started off the second half of The Art of Travel thinking I would be unable to relate with what exactly de Botton was saying. In the first section de Botton talks about how Wordsworth says that people who are in cities are going to have anxiety and are not going to live as well as they might out in nature. This is where I was lost. I love to be in a big city, I love to think that I am just one person working for something that no one cares about, that no one directly knows me, and that I am unidentifiable in a sea of millions. There is a freedom that I think comes in feeling this way. In Olympia I feel less like myself, I have to be careful what I do because I feel almost like I am being recorded, at every turn of a corner there could be someone I know standing there. Its not that I am doing something sinister and I am afraid of being caught, but just the idea of there always being the same people around doesn’t make me feel comfortable. I worry and stres about what I am contributing to the town. Being in Seattle feels like the complete opposite of this, when I’m in Seattle no one cares about me. My two sisters also lived within the city when I lived there, and we never ran into each other once. When I am in a big city I can sit alone at a bar or coffee shop and no one will come to check on me, ask me why I not with so and so, or if I im doing ok. I feel like I can just exist in a place as I need to be. The best way to describe how I feel in the city is small, and this feeling was my reentry point back into the chapter. De Botton actually talks about the feeling of being small, and although he is talking about nature when he describes how being next to a mountain makes him feel, it is exactly how I feel when I’m sandwiched between a few skyscrapers. De Botton speaks about how being in a place with intense scenic nature can make people think about the idea of it being made by a greater being, that it is too great for it to be left up to chance. I feel this same way sometimes when I think about cities, not that I think about them being made outside the hands of man, but that no one man was in control, that it was an effort of a collective, something bigger than any one person. All in all, the section of The Art of Travel on landscapes really did make me think about my field study because Seattle has so much nature surrounding it. I wonder if this is why I don’t feel anxiety in the city. There is a park in almost every neighborhood of Seattle, and it is almost difficult to find a spot where you can’t see or smell the water. In my field study I will be looking at the way people create music, if they turn to these little patches of nature in the city, take to the streets, or if it is a mix of both.

Another section of The Art of Travel I really related too, was when de Botton talks about John Ruskin’s love of sketching wherever he goes. Particularly I enjoyed when Ruskin describes what a sketcher would see compared to another man, he says: “The one will see a lane and trees; he will perceive the trees to be green, though he will think nothing about it; he will see that the sun shines, and that it has a cheerful effect; and that’s all! But what will the sketcher see? His eye is accustomed to search into the cause of beauty, and penetrate the minutest part of loveliness” I don’t think of myself as a person who is great at sketching, and I was concerned that I would be less struck by the city around me because Seattle isn’t new to me. However, now I feel like I will make some real discoveries by constantly sketching and learning to be “accustomed to search into the cause of beauty”