The Art of Travel

Returning from Barbados to London, de Botton discovers “that the city had stubbornly refused to change.” London is “unimpressed,” still grey and raining, which reminds de Botton that the world is indifferent to what happens in its inhabitants’ lives. De Botton feels as though there is nowhere worse on the planet than London.

De Botton again quotes Pascal’s Pensées: “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”

Nine years before Alexander von Humboldt set out for South America in 1799, the French writer Xavier de Maistre published a book about a Journey around My Bedroom. In 1798, he took a second such trip, which resulted in Nocturnal Expedition around My Bedroom. Whereas Humboldt’s mode of travel required an enormous amount of resources and equipment, de Maistre’s only needed his “pink-and-blue cotton pyjamas.” The “intense, romantic” de Maistre loved French philosophy and paintings of domestic scenes as a child; at 23, he took an interest in aeronautics and planned unsuccessfully to fly himself to America in a paper plane. He then invented “room travel” and wrote Journey around My Bedroom from his small apartment in Turin.

Introducing Journey around My Bedroom, de Maistre’s brother Joseph wrote that Xavier did not mean to disparage the great travelers of the past, but rather to offer a more practical and cost-effective travel option. Xavier particularly recommended it to the cash-strapped and cowardly.

De Botton declares that de Maistre’s trip “did not get very far.” De Maistre changes into his pyjamas and travels to his sofa, which he sees “through fresh eyes” and admires nostalgically, thinking back to the time he spent daydreaming on it. He looks back at his bed, appreciating its complexity and his sheets’ color coordination with his pyjamas. But he “may be accused of losing sight” of his travel’s purpose soon thereafter, as he begins to ponder his dog and women.

But de Botton sees de Maistre’s book as founded on the “profound and suggestive insight” that travel’s mind-set often matters more than its destination. By viewing familiar places through the travel mind-set, he thinks, people might find their home places just as interesting as exotic destinations like Humboldt’s South America.

De Botton states that receptivity, which leads people to approach places without pride or unrealistic expectations, is the most important characteristic of the “travelling mind-set.” People can revel in what they might consider “unremarkable small details” about the places where they live, and learn to notice “the layers of history beneath the present.” People tend to assume they have discovered everything at home and become blind to everything new that happens there; de Maistre’s goal was to “shake us from our passivity.” In his second book, he admires the night sky and laments that so few people take the time to do so, for they have begun to expect that their universe might be boring.

De Botton’s bedroom is too small for a real voyage, so he decides to instead travel around his neighborhood of Hammersmith, London. He feels strange wandering outside “with no particular destination in mind,” noticing a family and a double-decker bus pass by on the usual route to the Underground station that he has ceased to see as “anything other than a means to my end.” The people he encounters on the way to the station have been invisible since he first moved to Hammersmith.

Usually, when entering a new place, people direct their attention widely, to diverse phenomena. But, over time, they start to focus on the elements of the space that bear on whatever function they hope to perform there, until they pare their sensitivity down to just a few things like—during de Botton’s walk to the train—“the number of humans in our path, perhaps, the amount of traffic and the likelihood of rain.” By imposing his own “grid of interests” on the area, de Botton had lost the ability to reflect on the neighborhood’s particular sort of architecture or people.

During this walk, however, de Botton wants to “reverse the process of habituation, to dissociate my surroundings from the uses I had previously found for them.” He tries to view Hammersmith as if it is new and foreign for him, and soon “objects released latent layers of value” as he begins noticing things that previously passed invisibly, like a shop’s peculiar pillars and a restaurant’s fascinating patrons. On the bus, he begins to imagine the other riders’ private lives and wonders whether one corporate manager complaining about others’ inefficiency recognizes his own shortcomings. For de Botton, the neighborhood “began to collect ideas” as he reflects on why he finds certain features beautiful and striking.

De Botton explains that he prefers to travel alone, because others can often shape people’s expectations, personality, and interests on a trip, constraining their ability to follow their curiosity to its fullest extent. He embraces his “freedom to act a little weirdly” that day as he sketches a shop window in Hammersmith.

Xavier de Maistre was “also a great traveller in the classic sense”—he fought military campaigns in Italy and Russia. Whereas Alexander von Humboldt traveled to escape his “boring daily life” and discover a “marvellous world” overseas, de Maistre rejected the dichotomy between these two universes.

After reading de Maistre, Nietzsche remarked that “some people know how to manage their experiences” and learn to “become an arable soil that bears fruit three times a year,” while other people who witness incredible events “always remain on top, bobbing like a cork.” The former are a minority, “those who know how to make much of little,” and the rest “know how to make little of much.” While some have ventured to deserts, ice caps, and jungles without leaving any mark of their travels on their souls, de Botton concludes, de Maistre wanted people, “before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen.”