This, in other words, is an anti-travel book. It's title ought really to be "The Art of Staying at Home."
Ultimately it's his style that gives this author away. What other contemporary 33-year-old would write a sentence like "It had not always been thus"? The reason for this disdainful affectation of the antique is that De Botton wants you to think what a superior kind of person he is. He wants to be a classic writer, an essayist in some hallowed, timeless style. Every chapter title begins with the word "On" -- On Curiosity, On the Exotic, On the Sublime. This is how people titled their essays 200 years ago. De Botton wants to be seen as being on a par with classic English essayists like Hazlitt or De Quincey. Thinking of himself as an instant classic lies behind every sentence of this infuriating, mannered, affected, and ultimately deeply supercilious book.
But De Botton is an instant classic only in the sense that instant coffee is coffee -- in other words, hardly at all. As Hemingway wrote in Green Hills of Africa (elsewhere numbingly infuriating because it's almost entirely a record of shooting large animals for pleasure) no one can sit down to write a classic. What eventually becomes classic is what was in its own time fresh, innovative and original. If you consciously aim for classic status all you become is an artificial and self-admiring copy of somebody else.
Any innocent buying this book is likely to be profoundly disappointed. He might even have a good case for asking for his money back. The Art of Travel? Surely you'd have a right to expect whole chapters on the great destinations of the world, on India, China, Mongolia, Madagascar, South America, Iceland, Southeast Asia. No way. Instead, it's the fly on the windowpane that gets the bulk of the attention.
De Botton could probably claim to be the world's worst traveler. There's nothing wrong with that. But he insists on making a virtue of his shortcomings by penning a book on precisely the thing that runs most directly against his nature. It's as if the Pope had written a thriller or a book on fine food, assuming that because of who he is every thought that enters his head is certain to be of interest to his flock of devoted and grateful admirers.
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