INSPIRATION:
The Art of Travel
There's no shortage of advice on where to go, but we seldom ask why. As Alain de Botton reflects, there’s nothing like a train ride or fluffed-up pillow to get those wheels in our head turning…
Alain de Botton on the art of travel
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do. The task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand. Thinking improves when parts of the mind are given other tasks, are charged with listening to music or following a line of trees. The music or the view distracts for a time that nervous, censorious, practical part of the mind which is inclined to shut down when it notices something difficult emerging in consciousness and which runs scared of memories, longings, introspective or original ideas and prefers instead the administrative and the impersonal.
Alain de Botton: his writing has been termed a 'philosophy of everyday life'. Born in Zurich, Switzerland Alain de Botton now lives in London with his wife Charlotte and their sons Samuel and Saul.
Of all modes of transport, the train is perhaps the best aid to thought: the views have none of the potenial monotony of those on a ship or plane, they move fast enough for us not to get exasperated but slowly enough to allow us to identify objects. They offer us brief, inspiring glimpses into private domains, letting us see a woman at the precise moment when she takes a cup from a shelf in her kitchen, then carrying us on to a patio where a man is sleeping and then to a park where a child is catching a ball thrown by a figure we cannot see.
On a journey across flat country, I think with a rare lack of inhibition about the death of my father, about an essay I am writing on Stendhal and about a mistrust that has arisen between two friends. Every time the mind goes blank, having hit on a difficult idea, the flow of my consciousness is assisted by the possibility of looking out of the window, locking on to an object and following it for a few seconds, until a new coil of thought is ready to form and can unravel without pressure.
At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves – that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we can change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are.
The perfect complement to guides that tell us what to do when we get there, The Art of Travel tries to explain why we really went in the first place and helpfully suggest how we might be happier on our journeys.
Hotel rooms offer a similar opportunity to escape our habits of mind. Lying in bed in a hotel, the room quiet except for the occasional swooshing of an elevator in the innards of the building, we can draw a line under what preceded our arrival, we can overfly great and ignored stretches of our experience. We can reflect upon our lives from a height we could not have reached in the midst of everyday business – subtly assisted in this by the unfamiliar world around us: by the small unwrapped soaps on the edge of the basin, by the gallery of miniature bottles in the mini-bar, by the room-service menu with its promise of all-night dining and the view on to an unknown city stirring silently twenty-five floors below us.
Hotel notepads can be the recipients of unexpectedly intense, revelatory thoughts, taken down in the early hours while the breakfast menu (‘to be hung outside before 3am’) lies unattended on the floor, along with a card announcing the next day’s weather and the management’s hopes for a peaceful night.
This is an extract from The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton, priced £9.99, published by Penguin.
