“There are in our existence spots of time,

That with distinct pre-eminence retain a renovating virtue…

That penetrates, enables us to mount,

When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. “

-Baudelaire

This is a poem that Alain de Botton uses in his chapter “On the Country and the City” in The Art of Travel. He uses this poem to reiterate the ‘spiritual’ benefit s of respecting nature, much having to do with the experience of “sublimity” themed in the next chapter. I am reminded of the only time I tried a substance of what they call “pre-mature enlightenment” (Drugs are bad, mkay? Unless fed to you by a doctor). I went about my day walking through the Garfield Nature Trail, sitting next to the water at East Bay Park, and walking around a park in the rain at night. Anything I chose to focus on would reveal itself as the organic composite that it was (or could be). Cellular movements on the surface revealed themselves, counterpart to movements naked to the human eye. Everything equally had something to show. My perceptions were, of course, altered, and I took care in being aware of that due to the nature of the experience. What might de Botton have to say on this? On Baudelaire,

“He invited his readers to abandon their usual perspectives and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting or even inspiring?  Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with” (de Botton 147).

Surely, my experience is probably not what Baudelaire or de Botton had in mind. You might find my personal example distasteful. Nonetheless, I understand more fully what it could mean to “shuttle between perspectives”. Further engrained in me is how, with focus and determined curiosity, any object can have something valuable to show or tell. When I read Baudelaire’s poem, it occurred to me that certain experiences in fact permanently stain our memory, for better or worse. If it is possible that these stains can be for worse, then we ought to remedy ourselves with good ones for mental and “spiritual” health.

“Natural scenes have the power to suggest certain values to us – oaks dignity, pines resolution, lakes calm – and therefore may, in unobtrusive ways, act as inspirations to virtue” (de Botton 145). De Botton builds the suggestion that the remedy is to take a detour out of the city, and place ourselves within deep natural landscapes. Making ourselves fully present in a natural landscape may compel us to pursue moral qualities. But I don’t think we necessarily have to escape the urban environment in order to be inspired. What about skyscrapers suggesting to us determination or greed, sidewalks progression, oil rigs exploitation?

“[A successful work] will foreground elements ordinarily lost in the mass of data, stabilize them and, once we are acquainted with them, prompt us imperceptibly to find them in the world about us – or if we have already found them, lend us the confidence to give them weight in our lives” (de Botton 183). This is one important value de Botton turns our attention to of art. Van Gogh offered viewers qualities of the ordinary, worthy of attention, irrespective of their position in nature or not. The painting of a city corridor may help us find not only the sublimity of human architecture, but also our attention can be flipped towards the curiosity of how it displaces “nature”. Putting into practice in our daily life those qualities of “successful” art that allow us to be psychologically and “spiritually” moved thus becomes an invaluable cultivation.

An appropriate quote at this time: “My efforts are directed not to making a carpenter an artist, but to making him happier as a carpenter” (Ruskin, in de Botton 217). It may sound like I’ve been preaching about a formula for a happy life. But I don’t want to hear that anymore than you do. Rather, as implicit in de Botton’s book, it is about cultivating a full life. “Full” connotes the inclusion of a wide range. It’s not about being relentlessly happy – such an effort would render you a sociopath. Fulfillment comes from becoming aware of things from different perspectives through inquiry. If successful in this effort, we realize that one cannot escape to nature anymore than one can escape from nature, the sublime.