The Art of Travel by Alain De Botton

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I read the Art of Travel with rapidity to prepare me for a three month expedition I was about to embark on. I hoped to glean insights on how to approach travel, and the biggest takeaway is it depends on your receptivity to new experiences and ability to notice details. The world is rich with objects that tickle our curiosity, and travel is often the best opportunity to find new objects.

The trick is to hold onto that wonder and curiosity to all of facets of life, rather than boxing it in as an activity reserved for travel.

Botton literally illustrates that art is intricately connected to beauty and nature, the artists vocation highlighting things that stood out to them in their unique flavour of reality.

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Notes

How projects (and even whole lives) might be influenced by the simplest and most unexamined images of happiness

• the idea of postcards that give us a beacon of what is possible

The present moment began to recede and certain events to assume prominence, for memory was in this respect similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

• we can’t hold the world in its multisensory glory for long in our minds. We begin the human task of simplification, refinement, omitting the details so it fits a neat narrative.

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.

• there isn’t a way you can appreciate art and beauty when you’re struggling on the other more baser hierarchy of needs. That backbone needs to exist.

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

• be aware of this fact

I’m obsessed with inventing stories for people I come across.

Surely I was born elsewhere - I’ve always had what seem like memories or intuitions of perfumed shores and blue seas.

• transplanted by the winds we’re all here in this time and place by chance

He could create his own categories of value without either following or deliberately rebelling against the hierarchies of others.

• Humboldt on discovering so much in South America.
• Learning this ability is so important, so you can allow yourself to be mesmerised by what naturally draws you in.
• Why I like to travel without knowing things often

Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions. In childhood we ask; ‘Why is there good and evil?’ ‘How does nature work?’ “Why am I me?’ If circumstances and temperament allow, we then build on these questions during adulthood, our curiosity encompassing more and more of the world until, at some point, we may reach that elusive stage where we are bored by nothing.

• Never stop being curious, and follow it’s natural thread - your body is guiding you.

regular travel through nature was a necessary antidote to the evils of the city.

• I saw a reel on this, how many cultures prescribe hiking, nature or being outside to combat anxiety, depression etc.

give the charm of novelty to things of every day,

• Wordsworth inspirational

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. Won’t have a day go by where“I shall not derive some happiness from these images”

• Deep time - 4000 weeks

I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here?

Wordsworth had urged us to travel through landscapes to feel emotions that would benefit our souls. I set out for the desert in order to be made to feel small.

Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically reaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves

• that artists could paint a portion of the world and in consequence open the eyes of others to it.
• art connects to beauty + nature, sometimes without art providing a lens to see the world, we miss the delight that already exists (example of some English highlands that were thought of as barren until poetry by Wordsworth and others).

Ruskin judged to be the twin purposes of art: to make sense of pain and to fathom the sources of beauty.

Created by Apurva Shukla.

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