The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton

I've never been disappointed by anything by Monsieur de Botton (all right, so he's English: so what?) and this book was no exception.

All right, thoughts/quotes from the book:

1. Why art is more satisfying than life: "the anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present." (p 14-15)

2. Why travel doesn't solve all our problems: "I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island." Paradise, as pictured, can never quite be paradise because we are there, with all our same worries and flaws. (Rather like Schrodinger's cat, right?) Also, places cannot fully determine our happiness because they cannot fully change us.

3. "It was the fate of poets, like Christian pilgrims, to live in a fallen world while refusing to surrender their vision of an alternative, less compromised realm." Why then, can't a strict religion (like, say Mormonism, which definitely shares this "Christian pilgrim" view--only think of "in the world but not of the world") produce good poets? If the worldview is the same, one would think that religious folk would feel a certain kinship with poets, in acknowledging that shared awkwardness in post-Eden milieu. Is it that because religious people already have their vision as a given, they shy away from poetry, in which they would be forced to invent it on their own? Or is it like two awkward, unpopular teenagers, instinctively realizing that, in joining forces, they would only be asking for more bullying, more ostracism, more hatred from "the world"? Or have they just not realized the similarity?

4. About Edward Hopper: the paintings..."despite the bleakness they depict, are not themselves bleak to look at but rather allow the viewer to witness an acho of his or her own grief and thereby to feel less personally persecuted and beset by it. It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad..." (47). Bingo. Another of the redeeming features of Art.

5. "Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is before our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, and new thoughts, new places. Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. " (54) This is why I like travelling.

6. "To condemn ourselves for these minute concerns is to ignore how rich in meaning details may be." (75) One can fall in love, with a person, place, or thing, merely over the details. They are important.

7. "A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity, so that the new information is as uselses and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain." I've done this more than once. I really wish I could go back to some places--Greece, let's say--with a little more information about the significance, both historical and personal, of what I'm seeing.

8. He really liked the Sinai, saw in it the Sublime and the potential for communication with God. I had nearly the opposite reaction--it's a Godforsaken wasteland, the uglist place I have ever seen--yet came to the same conclusion: here, in that very same Godforsaken place, was a group of people perhaps the least God-forsaken of all time, and the marks of God's presence were, ironically enough, still covering the landscape.

9. This is the lesson he draws from the book of Job: "Do not be surprised that things have not gone your way, [God] declares: the universe is greater than you. Do not be surprised that you do not understand why they have not gone your way, for you cannot fathom the logic of the universe...Accept what is bigger than you and what you do not understand." (171)

10. "There was only one way to possess beauty properly, and that was by understanding it, by making oneself conscious of the factors (psychological and visual) responsible for it." (216) This made me want to learn to draw. Maybe that's something I'll do in all my spare time.