the Art of Travel Is to Deviate From Ones Plans
1) On what travel can reveal about the mode we live
If our lives are dominated past a search for happiness, then maybe few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest — in all its avidity and paradoxes — than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside of the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems — that is, issues requiring thought beyond the practical. Nosotros are inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we hear footling of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor and then trivial, and whose study might in pocket-size ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or 'homo flourishing'.
2) On how the joy of travel lies in receptivity
What, then, is a traveling mind-ready? Receptivity might be said to be its master characteristic. Receptive, we approach new places with humility. Nosotros acquit with us no rigid ideas most what is or is non interesting. We irritate locals because we stand in traffic islands and narrow streets and admire what they have to be unremarkable pocket-size details. We risk getting run over considering we are intrigued by the roof of a authorities building or an inscription on a wall. We discover a supermarket or a hairdresser's shop unusually fascinating. We dwell at length on the layout of a menu or the apparel of the presenters on the evening news. Nosotros are alive to the layers of history beneath the present and take notes and photographs. Home, by dissimilarity, finds us more settled in our expectations. We feel assured that we take discovered everything interesting about our neighborhood, primarily by virtue of our having lived at that place a long fourth dimension. It seems inconceivable that at that place could exist anything new to find in a identify where nosotros have been living for a decade or more than. Nosotros have go habituated and therefore bullheaded to information technology.
3) On the merits of traveling alone
It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially molded past the company we go on, for we temper our marvel to fit in with the expectations of others. They may have detail visions of who nosotros are and hence may subtly prevent sure sides of u.s. from emerging… Being closely observed by a companion tin besides inhibit our observation of others; then, too, we may get defenseless upwardly in adjusting ourselves to the companions questions and remarks, or feel the need to make ourselves seem more than normal than is good for our curiosity.
4) On the weird psychic juxtapositions of travel
Having made a journey to a place we may never revisit, we feel obliged to admire a sequence of things which have no connection to i another besides a geographic one and a proper agreement of which would require a range of qualities unlikely to be found in whatsoever one person. Nosotros are asked to be curious about Gothic architecture on one street and so promptly fascinated by Etruscan archaeology on the next.
5) On the way no travel story tin can ever evoke the true lived experience
Artistic accounts involve astringent abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel volume may tell united states, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the loma town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never just 'journey through an afternoon'. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within u.s.a.. The seat cloth is gray. Nosotros expect out the window at a field. We expect back inside. A drum of anxieties revolves in our consciousness. Nosotros notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack to a higher place the seats reverse. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to pelting. A driblet wends a muddy path downwardly the grit-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be. We expect dorsum out at the field. Information technology continues to rain. At last the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window. And still we may have reached the finish but of the first minutes of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence "He journeyed through the afternoon." A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing u.s. out with repetitions, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Bardak Electronics, the safety handle in the auto, a stray domestic dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands showtime on the rim and then in the heart of a laden ashtray. Which explains the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may exist easier to feel in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut abroad the periods of boredom and direct our attention to disquisitional 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 nowadays.
6) On the romantic appeal of travel
To the appeal that an attractive person might possess in ane'due south own country is added, in an exotic land, an attraction deriving from his or her location. If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities nosotros lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another state, one ambition may exist to weld ourselves more closely to values missing in our own culture.
7) On the mail-religious appeal of the sublime
It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane. It is as if these landscapes allowed travelers to feel transcendent feelings that they no longer felt in cities and the cultivated countryside. The landscapes offered them an emotional connection to a greater ability, even as they freed them of the need to subscribe to the more specific and now less plausible claims of biblical texts and organized religions.
8) On the fashion regal landscapes make us feel our own smallness
Humiliation is a perpetual risk in the world of men. It is non unusual for our will to be defined and our wishes frustrated. Sublime landscapes exercise not therefore innovate us to our ain inadequacy; rather, to bear on the crux of their appeal, they allow united states to conceive of a familiar inadequacy in a new and more helpful way. Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and take no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that nosotros must bow to necessities greater than ourselves. This is the lesson written into the stones of the desert and the ice fields of the poles. And so grandly is it written there that nosotros may come away from such places not crushed but inspired past what lies beyond us, privileged to exist bailiwick to such imperial necessities. The sense of awe may even shed into a desire to worship.
9) On the manner travel leads to introspection
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 accept in our heads: large thoughts at time requiring large views, and new thoughts, new places. Introspective reflections that might otherwise exist liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The heed may be reluctant to remember properly when thinking is all information technology is supposed to and then; the job can be as paralyzing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on need. Thinking improves when parts of the listen are given other tasks — charged with listening to music, for example, or following a line of trees. The music or the view distracts for a fourth dimension that nervous, censorious, practical part of the listen which is inclined to shut down when it notices something difficult emerging in consciousness, and which runs scared of memories, longings and introspective or original ideas, preferring instead the authoritative and the impersonal.
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Source: https://rolfpotts.com/de-botton-art-of-travel/
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