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The Art of Travel
By Alain de Botton
We like this book. It deals with a question we often ask ourselves: why bother travelling?
De Botton, who was writing part of this book while on a trip to Barbados, wonders whether he might not have been happier reading brochures and looking at the BA Worldwide Timetable. Is he one of us?
He admits in the book that, when he is in London and gets the blues, he either takes himself to Heathrow Airport to watch planes land and take off, like Baudelaire watched the ships at Honfleur; or he drives to a motorway service station to look at other listless people stirring the coffee or toying with their food.
There is a good example of how to handle an urge to travel: It is in the novel A Rebours by J.-K. Huysmans where the Duc des Esseintes, a gentleman living in a vast villa on the outskirts of Paris, was going to travel to London. On the way to the train, he stops in an English tavern next to the Gare Saint Lazare (a train station for London-bound trains) where he dines on roast beef and Stilton cheese, drinks two pints of beer, reads Baedeker’s Guide to London. Then, as the moment to board the train approaches, he thought about how wearing it would actually be to go to London, how he would have to run to the station, fight for a porter, board the train, endure an unfamiliar bed, stand in queues. There in the tavern, wasn't he already in London . . . with the English food, cutlery, and smells? So he paid the bill, left the tavern and took the first train back to his villa . . . never to leave home again.
There's an interesting tidbit in the book ─ we've put it up our trivia page [click here] ─ is that, after Wordsworth’s appointment as Poet Laureate, a movement was launched to rename the Lake District “Wordsworthshire.”
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To learn more . . . and order if you wish . . . click here for Amazon in the US . . . here for Amazon in the UK.
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