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The famous 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, whom de Botton profiles in his second essay, grew up as something of a misfit in French society: he did not get along with his family, schoolmates, or peers in the aristocracy. He always dreamed of traveling and loved spending time around ships, which he saw as elegant marvels of human ingenuity, in part because their departures reflected the promise of a better life elsewhere. He once left on a trip to India but forced the ship’s captain to turn around halfway after they reached Mauritius and Baudelaire realized he was just as miserable as he used to be in France. He praised “poets” who sought fulfillment outside of ordinary society, and his ambivalent relationship to traveling reflects the disappointment of realizing that foreign places will not relieve one of one’s fundamental problems, as well as the thrill that de Botton shares in anticipating and imagining travel.
Charles Baudelaire Quotes in The Art of Travel
The The Art of Travel quotes below are all either spoken by Charles Baudelaire or refer to Charles Baudelaire . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 2 Quotes
“Life is a hospital in which every patient is obsessed with changing beds: this one wants to suffer in front of the radiator, and that one thinks he’d get better if he was by the window.”
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French poet Charles Baudelaire was afflicted by a curious variation on wanderlust: after an early trip that he abandoned after finding that his usual depression did not improve, Baudelaire never traveled but always dreamed of doing so. He recognized that actual travel would never fulfill his fantasy by erasing all his problems and offering him a fresh start, but he nevertheless dreamed constantly about doing it—so constantly that he seldom thought about the same destination for long before another one caught his eye. The metaphor of wanting to suffer in the right part of the hospital, beyond reflecting Baudelaire’s pessimistic Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis consectetur et. Dicta impedit ut. Ducimus possimus quo. Non inventore in. Eligendi
The twenty-four-hour diner, the station waiting room and the motel are sanctuaries for those who have, for noble reasons, failed to find a home in the ordinary world—those whom Baudelaire might have dignified with the honorific poets.
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De Botton summarizes the beauty he sees in the transient places of travel, which Edward Hopper depicted in his paintings of American life on the road. Places like diners, motels, and station waiting rooms exist only to help people transition from one place to another—it is as though they are not true places in themselves but merely stops along the road from point A to point B. The people one finds there—and whom Hopper paints—are accordingly themselves in a state of transition, and de Botton suggests that these traveling places thus often reflect travelers’ solitude and uncertainty. He concludes that Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis
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Charles Baudelaire Character Timeline in The Art of Travel
The timeline below shows where the character Charles Baudelaire appears in The Art of Travel. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2: On Traveling Places
From his childhood onwards, de Botton writes, the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire never quite fit into any social environment: he hated his family, got expelled from “a...
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Baudelaire’s apprehensive desire to travel appeared frequently in his poetry and writing, and he admitted that...
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Baudelaire saw travel as the distinctive mark of “poets,” people whose dissatisfaction with home led them...
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...finds comfort in “the ceaseless landings and takeoffs of aircraft,” just as after a breakup Baudelaire used to watch ships dock and depart at a quayside, promising to “set sail for...
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In addition to traveling places, Baudelaire also loved “machines of motion,” and especially ships, which he found a technological wonder representing...
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...to look more like mutating steam than the “horizontal ovoids” people see from the ground. Baudelaire wrote about the clouds in his poem “The Outsider,” asking, “what do you love, you...
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Hopper actually read Baudelaire throughout his life, which de Botton finds understandable given their “shared interests in solitude, in...
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...corner of the world” and found herself without “a home in the ordinary world,” like Baudelaire’s “poets.”
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