What is Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel about?
The Art of Travel (2002) is a book of essays about why we travel and why trips so often feel different from what we imagined. Alain de Botton organises it in nine chapters, each pairing a journey of his own with a writer, painter or thinker as a guide, from Huysmans and Baudelaire to Wordsworth, Van Gogh and Ruskin. Its lesson is that travelling well is mostly about how you look.
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Most travel books tell you where to go. The Art of Travel asks what happens to us when we get there, and why the beach that looked perfect in the brochure feels oddly ordinary once we are lying on it with all our usual worries. It is a gentle, funny, thoughtful book, and a good one to read before booking anything.
The basics
Alain de Botton's book was published by Hamish Hamilton in May 2002, according to the London Review of Books' review. It is a series of essays, illustrated with photographs of the places and paintings discussed, and arranged in five sections, Departure, Motives, Landscape, Art and Return, divided into nine chapters, as a review reproduced on the author's site describes.
How it works
Each chapter combines two journeys: a trip of de Botton's own, and the life or work of a "guide" who thought hard about the same question. The cast, according to the LRB, includes Huysmans, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Xavier de Maistre, Alexander von Humboldt, Ruskin, Edmund Burke, Wordsworth, Van Gogh, the painter Edward Hopper and the Book of Job.
Some highlights:
- On anticipation. The opening chapter draws on Huysmans's novel À rebours, whose hero prefers imagining a journey to making one. De Botton uses it to look at the gap between the trip in our heads and the trip itself.
- On the in-between places. Planes and other spaces of transit, with Baudelaire and Edward Hopper among the guides.
- Wordsworth in the Lake District. In the fifth chapter, de Botton takes The Prelude to the Lakes and tests the poet's advice about nature against a real walk, the LRB notes.
- Van Gogh in Provence. How a painter can teach you to see a landscape you would otherwise walk straight past.
- Travelling at home. Xavier de Maistre's Journey Around My Bedroom (1794) offers a mischievous idea: you can travel with fresh eyes without leaving the house.
What we took from it
- You bring yourself with you. Much of what disappoints on holiday is not the place but the fact that we arrive with our usual moods, worries and bodies.
- Look harder, not further. Paying attention, sketching, writing, asking questions, turns a view into an experience.
- Curiosity needs a hook. We enjoy places more when they connect to something we already care about.
- The ordinary can be the destination. Your own street, seen properly, has more in it than you think.
These ideas pair nicely with our mindset page on not overplanning holidays: fewer sights, more looking.
Who will enjoy it
Anyone who travels and has ever felt that faint, guilty flatness on arrival. Readers who like essays, art and literature will get the most from it, but de Botton writes clearly and lightly, so no background is required. It also works as a companion to the classics of travel to Italy, such as Goethe's Italian Journey.
FAQ
Is The Art of Travel a travel guide?
No. It recommends no hotels and no itineraries. It is about the psychology and pleasure of travel, wherever you are going.
Do I need to know the writers and artists he discusses?
Not at all. De Botton introduces each one as he goes, and the illustrations help.
Is it a good book to take on holiday?
Very. The chapters are self-contained, so you can read one on the plane and another on the terrace, and each will change how you spend the next afternoon.
Will it make me travel more, or less?
Probably neither. It is more likely to change how you travel: slower, with more attention, and with lower expectations of the place to fix everything for you.
Sources
Written by the Zestasy editors. General information for curious adults, not medical, nutrition or training advice.