Edward Hopper, Wellfleet Road (1931).

“Journeys are the midwives of thought.” states Alain de Botton somewhat grandiosely in his book The Art of Travel. It’s not that I don’t agree with this statement, it just seems like a really dramatic and overly complex way to say that new experiences make us think differently and about different things.
The Art of Travel left me feeling really on the fence. I mean, I watched de Botton’s interview with the BBC and have seen the things he’s created at his school, The School of Life, and I was really excited to read this book but after reading it I just felt – exasperated. De Botton presented many simple and interesting ideas but presented them in such a revelatory fashion that the simple ideas somehow felt invalid and foolish.

Charles Baudelaire.

Charles Baudelaire

De Botton’s knowledge and writing skills were most prominent in the sections written about other people. Although I found it a strange choice, my favorite was his section on Charles Baudelaire who has long been one of my favorite poets. I think it’s safe to say that the French poet’s works are full of duende – longing, depression, despair, and of course death. As mentioned in The Art of Travel, Le Voyage was written by Baudelaire after his return from a particularly traumatic and ultimately unsuccessful voyage to India.

Baudelaire came to see travelers as poets set on journeys to discover new horizons that would somehow make sense of and dissolve the despair they had felt at home – but as he found out sadness is tied to a person like a dark shadow that can not be easily escaped. De Button wrote about Le Voyage as if it is a piece that simply shows Baudelaire’s ambiguous feelings towards travel it is much more than that, it reflects his ambiguous feelings towards life. It contains all the horrors and wonders that exist in this world.

You can read the full poem here.

Le Voyage by Charles Baudelaire (part 3)

Astonishing voyagers! What splendid stories
We read in your eyes as deep as the seas!
Show us the chest of your rich memories,
Those marvelous jewels, made of ether and stars.

We wish to voyage without steam and without sails!
To brighten the ennui of our prisons,
Make your memories, framed in their horizons,
Pass across our minds stretched like canvasses.

Tell us what you have seen.

Escapism

Something I found particularly interesting in The Art of Travel is all the immensely dark reference material de Botton used. I was surprised to see the likes of Marquis de Sade, Gustave Flaubert, and Baudelaire mentioned in a travel book and it seemed really odd to me. Of course I love all these authors but they all tend to write about devastation and escape which was really strange to read in between sections of de Botton’s “breezy” travel stories, though once I became aware of this I began to notice excess pessimism littered throughout the book. The childish fight over a desert, his challenge to get out of bed in the morning, the excessive use of the word “despair” in passages about mundane details…Even the artists that he chose focused more on depression and loneliness like Edward Hopper and his BBC interview he said things like he hopes his children do not become avid readers because people who love books are depressed. The Art of Travel began to seem more like a story of a man who desires escape more than a philosophical travel book.

A portrait of Marquis de Sade shrouded by demons by H. Bieberstein (Paris, 1912).

Conclusion

The Art of Travel definitely had some great information in it but was shrouded in superfluous description that really lost me. I think that though the ideas presented were good, they were not worthy of the revelatory tone the book was written in which may have been warranted if it was written in the 19th century. I loved certain sections like the ones about Charles Baudelaire, Edward Hopper and Alexander von Humboldt and am looking forward to reading more profiles later on in the book.