Alain de Botton: The Art of Travel

Everyone knows I'm a massive reader. There is nothing more I like than sitting down with a thick book on ancient ruins, views of Derbyshire, birdsong or stately homes.

However this book, and especially a single chapter of it, is speaking to me in a profound way, igniting again a passion for art. It makes plain the things which I feel vividly, but could never express verbally or in writing. De Botton is verbalising my unconcious thoughts, as if an interpreter for a mute child.

The chapter in question is the second, entitled "On Travelling Places". De Botton uses the work of Edward Hopper and Charles Baudelaire as mirrors to hold up against his own troubled thoughts. On service stations at night -

"I remained in one corner, eating fingers of chocolate and taking occasional sips of orange juice. I felt lonely but, for once, this was a gentle even pleasant kind of loneliness because, rather than unfolding against a backdrop of laughter and fellowship, in which i would suffer from a contrast between my mood and the environment, it had its locus in a place where everyone was a stranger, where the difficulties of communication and the frustrated longing for love seemed to be acknowledged and brutally celebrated by the architecture and lighting."

I have, through De Botton, restarted a journey that I have long postponed. Next stops - Hopper and Baudelaire.