"I am as much Chinese as French," wrote Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary. He longed to escape his Europeanness and become one with the perfumed, enchanted East. The great experience of his youth was a trip to Egypt, then seen, with its camels, palm trees and inexact morals, as the epitome of all the East could offer a buttoned-up, repressed Westerner.
Alain De Botton is widely perceived as a rising star in the British literary establishment. Still only 33, he has written books attempting to popularize Proust, philosophy, and falling in love, and several are already available in Taiwan in Chinese translations. Now he offers us his thoughts on travel, his own experiences interspersed with those of a range of literary figures, Flaubert among them.
The central problem with this book is that De Botton is no traveler. He opens with a quick trip to Barbados, currently a fashionable destination for the London elite, follows it with brief forays to Madrid (five days), the English Lake District (three days), Provence and Amsterdam, and even manages to get himself to the Sinai desert. Most foreign residents of Taiwan will nevertheless be excused for thinking of this as pretty tame.
But, De Botton would reply, that is not the point. The point to him is not where you go but what you see. A traveler can circle the globe and see less than someone of a more perceptive disposition who takes a walk round his own bedroom. In fact, he ends by doing just that, and the book even contains a photo of his bedroom, complete with shelves of learned volumes with their titles carefully in focus, to prove it.
He gazes at giant aircraft coming in to land at London's Heathrow airport and muses on the fact that only hours before they were setting off from Malaysia, Java or Singapore. It's the mind, the imagination, that's the greatest of all travelers, he muses. The body often finds travel tiresome. Books are cumbersome items to travel with, and most of the books he wants when traveling remain annoyingly at home.
De Botton is essentially a bad traveler, and this book is his justification for being just that. When he's abroad he's uneasy, fending off feelings of cultural displacement by analyzing minute details such as an Exit sign at Amsterdam's airport. He only relaxes again when, sooner rather than later, he gets back home. There among his books he can once again be lord of all he surveys, handing down potted versions of his favorites to lesser mortals without the leisure to read them.
He craftily makes a virtue out of his own physical lassitude, admiring the mundane details of highway service stations and then referring the reader to the paintings of Edward Hopper in justification. These, to De Botton, do not represent the dreary face of modern life but a wistful beauty that is there if only you look hard enough for it.
His quick trip to the English Lake District perfectly encapsulates his approach. This area has some 50 modest mountains dramatically sited within a rather confined area. But De Botton doesn't take the trouble to climb a single one of them. Instead, he takes a short car ride, listens to an animal rummaging about in a bush, and then drives back to his hotel where he remarks on the patterns the rain is making on the windows.
Spectacular views, however easy of access, interest him no more than splendid beaches or fabulous temples. Instead, he prides himself on the thoughts he can summon up from regarding the minutest particulars, and justifies his disdain for what most other people enjoy about travel by placing himself next to great literary names plucked from his well-stocked shelves.
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