travel

Alain de Botton begins his book The Art of Travel with the story of a vacation he took to Barbados to escape the London winter.  He describes and critiques the mailer he received that eventually led to his trip as well the difference between his expectations and the reality.  He emphasizes, as he always does, the comic aspects of his trip: the cliché embedded in the trip, his pettiness and self-centeredness, and the folly of his whole effort to escape through travel.  He contrasts his own folly with the wisdom in A Rebours by J. K. Huysman, a novel in which the main character, taken by an intense desire to visit London after reading Dickens, plans a trip to England from his native Paris.  He departs on his journey and spends time among English ex-patriates near the station as he waits for his train.  He decides that he has had his fill of the experience of Englishness in a pub and immediately heads for home never to venture on such a trip again.  Huysmans knows that travel itself is disappointing, a folly; all that is valuable in travel lies in the anticipation of the journey and not in the traveling itself.

de Botton’s book continues in this way for another 200 pages, each chapter an essay on some aspect of traveling.  In each chapter he employs the same technique of contrasting his own ineptness with the ideas or life of some historical figure, usually a philosopher or scientist or artist of some sort.  He plays the self-satisfied but ridiculous everyman who may recognize his own folly but sees it as acceptable because so typical.  The historical figure, in contrast, dispenses wisdom and understands human life well enough to not only illuminate our folly but also to reveal how we ought to live.  It is a Socratic dialogue in which the author casts himself as the idiot interlocutor that Socrates embarrasses in the public square.

This is a clever conceit and has served de Botton well.  He gets readers’ sympathy by portraying himself as the fool who needs advice and help.  Readers are more likely to accept the advice when it’s offered not to scold them or even to help them, but to help some other hapless fellow.  This method is consistent through all de Botton’s non-fiction books, all those since his breakthrough How Proust can Change your Life.

The technique, though, has its limitations and de Botton’s great weakness is a tendency to glibly simplify ideas.  He seems to think that wisdom is simple and doesn’t bothering thinking about or addressing the many problematic implications of the ideas his wise-men offer.  And this weakness is compounded in this book because, unlike Proust, each chapter has a different historical guide (and sometimes several) and so ultimately his treatment is even more superficial than usual.  In the end, this makes this the weakest of his books so far.  I notice, though, that the books he’s written since 2002 all deal with issues raised by the chapters in this book, so perhaps he needed to write this book in order to find subjects to explore in greater detail in later books:  one’s status, one’s environment, and, later this year, one’s occupation.