He remembers Baudelaire’s ambivalence toward travel-the poet cut short a trip to India when he found that the voyage did not heal his depression, but he continued dreaming about traveling “anywhere! anywhere!” and waiting at the docks to watch ships “set sail for happiness.” Baudelaire believed that “poets” who could not find satisfaction in conventional society were destined to travel in search of something better, and de Botton sees Edward Hopper’s paintings of pensive, lonely characters in American traveling places as odes to such poetic wanderers. ![]() De Botton finds a poetic loneliness in a fluorescently-lit roadside restaurant and a promise of happiness in watching planes take off and land at London’s Heathrow airport. Whereas des Esseintes came to believe that travel was better in the imagination than in reality, which he thought diluted places’ distinctive qualities with ordinary images, de Botton insists that travel can differ from people’s expectations without being a failure.ĭe Botton’s next essay, “On Traveling Places,” expounds the virtues of the airport, service station, shipyard, motel, and train car, in conversation with French poet Charles Baudelaire and American painter Edward Hopper. Huysman’s novel À Rebours, who becomes enamored with the idea of visiting London after reading Dickens but decides to turn back once he reaches the train station. He compares his trip to that of the Duc des Esseintes, the protagonist of J.K. When he arrived, de Botton quickly tired of the beach and got into an argument with his girlfriend M., which made him realize that travel cannot offer people aesthetic or material joy until they first meet their basic psychological needs. De Botton recalls his own vacation to sunny Barbados, inspired by a brochure that promised palm trees and sea while he was caught up in the dreary London winter. In his first essay, “On Anticipation,” de Botton explains why travel so often disappoints: people tend to expect serenity and continuous joy on their vacations, which they conceive as breaks from their everyday lives, but then become surprised to discover that they only find moments of happiness and cannot let go of their everyday problems. De Botton argues that travel teaches people about their own character, values, and potential by exposing them to places that they may discover they prefer to home, landscapes and art that teach them about beauty and humanity’s limited perspective, and a travel mind-set that allows them to find a sense of wonder in the places where they already live. ![]() To this end, in each of the book’s nine essays, de Botton juxtaposes his own travels with those of canonical Western artists and writers (all are European men from the 18th and 19th centuries, besides one 20th century American man, painter Edward Hopper). In The Art of Travel, essayist Alain de Botton reflects on the philosophical dimensions of travel: he sees travel as a reflection of the human search for happiness and wonders how and why people should travel, not merely where.
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