Art, Travel, and the Search for Happiness Theme Analysis

As his book’s title implies, Alain de Botton is deeply concerned with travel’s relationship to art, both literary and visual, as well as aesthetic experience more broadly. Artists and writers are de Botton’s traveling companions throughout this book, because he thinks that their travels (and those of the characters they have created) can offer contemporary tourists valuable insight into the places they visit and, more importantly, the how and why of traveling. He thinks not only about the process of traveling as a form of art, but also about art that depicts and influences travel. Art and travel are ultimately deeply similar because both fundamentally hinge on the relationship between the subjective observer and the objective world, and as such their value relies on an individual’s aesthetic sensibilities. Ultimately, de Botton suggests that aesthetic experiences—like those that inspire and emerge from both art and travel—play a core role in human happiness.

Art inspires travel and travel inspires art. Throughout the book, de Botton travels in response to art and literature (in addition to using such works to interpret his own travel experiences). A photograph inspires him to travel to Barbados, William Wordsworth’s poems lead him to England’s Lake District, and the only thing he can bring himself to appreciate about Provence is its physical beauty, as depicted by Vincent van Gogh. Art also inspires many of de Botton’s historical or literary subjects to travel: the Duc des Esseintes decides to travel to London when he reads Charles Dickens and to Holland after he sees Dutch paintings, and Gustave Flaubert decided to visit the “Orient” after reading novels and poems about it. Travel also leads artists, writers, and thinkers to produce some of their most valuable work. Flaubert consistently evokes the “Orient” in his novels, van Gogh was at his most productive after he first arrived in Provence, and Xavier de Maistre decided to write his most famous book, Journey around My Bedroom, only after he traveled extensively throughout the world and came to think of travel as a mindset. De Botton suggests that this close relationship stems from a fundamental similarity between art and travel: the value of each is aesthetic, which means that travelers and artists alike chase what they find beautiful, new, and transformative.

Not only does art inspire travel, de Botton claims, but travel is itself an art: it is a means to both shape and interpret one’s vision of the world. De Botton argues that both art and travel are eye-opening because they foreground certain images and experiences while erasing others from view. For instance, van Gogh’s paintings of Provence are significant in the history of art, according to de Botton, because they allowed people to see the region through new lenses. In fact, after learning about van Gogh, de Botton notices Provence in an entirely new way because he begins paying attention to the aesthetic features that van Gogh emphasized.

Because travel is not a science, for de Botton, rigid travel is meaningless travel. In the essay “On Curiosity,” he tours Madrid with the assistance of a guidebook that he finds utterly boring—it offers him a predetermined series of directions and factoids, declaring what is important without giving the traveler any room to pursue their particular interests. He contrasts this guidebook, which forced established information down the traveler’s throat, with Alexander von Humboldt’s 18th century voyages to South America, which were fruitful specifically because his own curiosity led him to a discover a wide variety of previously unknown laws governing the natural world (like ocean currents and the altitude where flies live). Travel also introduces people to new stimuli, letting them use the facts they discover and places they encounter to enhance their lives. When he arrives in Amsterdam and notes curious cultural differences, de Botton sees these differences as promising that the Netherlands “may in critical ways prove more congenial than my own to my temperament and my concerns.” Indeed, he sees travel as a means for people to discover ways of life that suit them better than their current ones. In this way, beyond helping a traveler interpret the world around them, travel can ultimately reveal the traveler to themselves.

De Botton suggests that aesthetic experiences like art and travel do not merely help people develop this aesthetic self-knowledge, but also become more valuable the more they develop it. In his first chapter, de Botton argues that “few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of [the human quest for happiness]—in all its ardour and paradoxes—than our travels” because such travels reveal people’s “understanding of what life might be about, outside of the constraints of work and the struggle for survival.” Such an understanding is inevitably subjective, for it concerns the meaningful dimensions of one’s life that are not rooted in the activities all people necessarily share; in travel, people can choose to do nearly anything in nearly any place (within reason), so what they choose reflects what they fundamentally value as individuals. If traveling reflects an individual’s sense of purpose and calibration to their environment, then this explains why a shift in mindset—i.e. a shift in that purpose and calibration—can turn the familiar environments of home into sources of unexpected joy. This is why, in his final chapter, de Botton learns to re-experience his home neighborhood of Hammersmith, London, by viewing it as an aesthetically saturated environment with the capacity to surprise him rather than the unexciting, empty space in which his everyday life takes place. While art and travel might not be completely necessary for humans to achieve happiness, de Botton thinks they offer people important lessons about what they are, desire, and have the potential to become, but also that they become more fulfilling the more one figures out the answers to these questions.

Ultimately, to de Botton, both art and travel contribute to the human quest for joy because they demonstrate people’s distinctive perspectives on and agency in the world; one person’s successful trip is another’s failure, just as one person’s masterpiece is another’s dud. Travel and art are natural bedfellows because they both reflect—and force people to reflect on—the role of individual aesthetic judgment in the human quest for meaning.