The Art of Travel

Alain De Botton

I am looking for a new job. I've been working in retail now for quite long enough and so I have been spending significant amounts of time being trafficked around on our fair city's trams in the search for employment. Currently my drive to work exceeds an hour and although the time itself is missed, the greater crime is that while driving you are of course unable to apply your eyes and hands to much else. I was talking to a friend recently who confessed that, were it not for the time he spends on public transport, he would probably not get around to reading much either.

The Art of Travel seemed an appropriate choice for the countless little tram journeys I am continuing to take, as I shuttle from office to office, offering myself as cubicle fodder for a reasonable fee. Now I won't lie to you, the book took a little getting into at first and the open and unhurried approach taken by the author seemed little competition for the myriad distractions offered by even the most prosaic tram journey. By the end of the second chapter, (my brain beaten into a strange submission by the latest round of probing employment middlemen) Alain De Botton was still losing out to the latest sweaty, sticky or remote (and therefore attractive) fellow passenger. I started to wonder if this guy was really all he was cracked up to be.

Then, somewhere around chapter three (Stop 13) things took a shift for the better. De Botton was discussing motivations for travel, specifically the lure of the exotic. He describes his personal experiences and reflections travelling to Amsterdam, and the peculiar feeling of finding a place simultaneously foreign and familiar. Our 'guide' to this particular idea is one Gustave Flaubert, a nineteenth-century Frenchman who was continuously vexed and often outright contemptuous of his homeland, his people and their customs. Since he was young Flaubert had harboured a deep fascination for the lands and cultures of what we would now term the Middle East. In his time the area was known as the Orient, and was steeped in mystery and adventure. Could Flaubert find a life in deeper accord with his own constitution in a land so alien from his birthplace? Sitting in that old tram car it all began to click. I became genuinely interested in the thoughts and exploits of this nineteenth-century traveller, whose yearnings for a more vital, colourful and exotic society began to resonate with mine.

More than merely offsetting historical commentary against a contemporary personal account for the purposes of exploring the subject of travel insofar as it can be used to highlight basic human concerns and desires, De Botton manages something rather more interesting. He invites you to locate yourself within the discussion, creating a space where you feel that your voice would be at home between the superstar thinkers presented. The personalities that feature in the book are not held up as great teachers, or authorities, or as links in a proud philosophical tradition. They are misfits, eclectics, and outsiders who, in developing their ideas have managed somehow to capture something, if not essential, then at least important to the way we live our lives.

Moreover it allowed me to relearn a lesson that I seem to need to relearn on a fairly regular basis: that, bedsides improving conceptual dexterity, 'thinkers' or 'philosophers' can, through their works, make for rather good company.

Review by Alex Scott