The Art Of Travel by Alain de Botton

reviewed by Eric Anderson

I don't get out much. While I claim to be both a dreamer and a traveler, mostly I'm a cubicle dweller, circling 21st century exurban corporate America locales in an endless commute: home, kids to school, work, home, chain restaurants and strip malls and big box outlets flowing past my windshield like a trip through logoworld. Sure, I've criss-crossed the American west on the interstates and two-lane blacktops for 25 years now, but until last summer I'd never been off North America, unless you count floating on a Boogie board in the Pacific Ocean.

Last July I found myself in Norway, of all places. Confronted with the realities of travel in a semi-foreign land -- at least as foreign as I'd ever seen, despite the fact all the natives spoke faultless English, looked pretty much like me and ate the same sorts of food I tend to eat -- I began to wonder about the nature of travel. I was mostly having fun, but there were fleeting doubts here and there, hovering on the far edges of my brain. Why do I feel guilty eating mall pizza? Shouldn't we try to speak Norwegian all the time? And: Man it's frustrating trying to buy gas at the pump when you can't read the signs.

The unsettling question: Should I try to totally immerse myself in the local culture, food and language and perhaps suffer (as when I spent my first night toiletside hurling the fish I ate while seated on a rolling boat)? Or should I seek out the creature comforts of American life (mall pizza and hotel chains I recognized) and just enjoy sightseeing my way around Norway as I do around, say, Utah or Oregon?

A month after my return, I still wasn't sure. So when a friend suggested Alain De Botton's 'The Art of Travel’ (Pantheon, 2002) to help me find an answer, I checked it out.

De Botton's book is separated into nine short meditations on "Departure," "Motives," "Landscape," "Art" and the "Return." Each of these is further divided into smaller chunks as he writes about his experiences on the road in Bermuda, Madrid, Provence and the Lakes District of England and at home in Hammersmith, England. This is interspersed with lavish illustrations, photographs by the author, and ruminations and advice from great 19th century artists, writers and adventurers.

They speak not so much about travel, but more about the proper frame of mind to hold when you go. De Botton wants you to think about how to see the world and, more importantly, why you'd want to in the first place. This philosophical slant is to be expected from a guy whose previously published best-seller is called "How Proust Can Change Your Life."

As De Botton points out, the reality of travel seldom matches our daydreams. The tragi-comic disappointments are well-known: the disorientation, the mid-afternoon despair, the lethargy before ancient ruins. With precise sentences and a fine collection of citations, he explores the reason we get the feelings I had in Oslo: the yearning for a good bowl of Cheerios instead of more herring for breakfast, a readable newspaper headline, a desire for the return of self confidence when using the ATM.

‘The Art of Travel’ has advice for three different kinds of people. There are those who believe "if you can dream it, why bother doing it?" This is very good advice if you like your couch, your television and your refrigerator. De Botton summarizes this theory well: anticipation is everything. Getting there is all the fun. If the journey is the reward, then thinking about the journey is an even better solution. But you'd never get further than the local 7-Eleven.

Then there are those who want travel to be just like staying home. There's a lot to be said for comfort, enjoyment and a calm digestive tract, that's for sure. Who doesn't want to be waited on hand and foot in plush surroundings? Who doesn't want every detail planned by others and scenic bus tours to capture every official "must see" museum and waterfall. Then again, what's the point of going if you're just going to bend the foreign culture to fit your own?

There are also those True Believers who would travel most happily with a toothbrush and good will, living off the kindness of strangers and looking to experience all the local culture they can. If you're young, single and courageous, this should be you! Now's the time, sister. Hit the road, Jack. But this approach doesn't work for a family of four traveling overseas with teen-agers whose parents (i.e., me) bring them along with good intentions, hoping to infect them with a love of travel.

So, are you a traveler -- one who accepts the local culture -- or a tourist -- one who wants local culture to meet your needs? The book might be for you, regardless.

In the end, 'The Art of Travel' equates travel with self discovery, mindfulness, memory, and -- perhaps most importantly to De Botton -- learning to see.

Me? I'm somewhere in the soft middle: I wandered Norwegian record stores and book stores and tried to be polite by learning a few key phrases in the native language. I certainly ate what they ate and you can be sure I tried the local brews. I was also happy to eat pizza a couple of times when the idea of another fishy meal made my belly roil. And I wanted to see for myself those popular things Lonely Planet said was worth seeing.

How else would I know that I’d been there? You know, besides the photos I took? I was there. I saw. And I would've seen more if I'd read De Botton's advice before I went.

As Emerson said, "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."