The Art of Travel

I have just finished reading Alain de Botton's 'The Art of Travel' which is an absolute must-read for any person who enjoys moving about around the world, or even around their own back garden. De Botton analyses why we travel, why we travel to where we travel, how we travel, why we feel the way we do when we travel and so on. He draws examples from literature (Flaubert, Pascal, Baudelaire), art (Rubens, Delacroix, Van Gogh), as well as science and his own travels.

On why we fall in love with places, referring to why he loves Amsterdam, he asks;

"Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes?"

He quotes Pascal in Pensees, 68 " When I consider the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immesnity of spaces of which I know nothing and which no nothing of me, 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?"

De Botton mirrors Ruskin's contempt towards travellers who insist on seeing everything in record time; "No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier or wiser."

There is also one final gem, towards the end of the book; quoting De Maistre; "I advise every man to get pink and white bed linen."

However random these thoughts, they all come together into a damn fine read. I bought the book new, asked for a discount at the WHSmith's Paddington Station since the cover was scuffed. The book, appropriately, now looks like a book I have had for a few years; it has been to Milan, to Zurich, to Lucerne, to London and Kent.

Any book written by someone whose name sounds and looks so similar to 'Bottom' is certainly worth reading!