Travelling companion II
With "The Art of Travel", British philosopher Alain de Botton has written a book that challenges readers to consider his or her reasons for leaving home. Nine different musings titled "On Anticipation" and "On Curiosity", to name but two, are collected in five chapters headed, for example, "Departures" and "Landscape", and they serve to introduce us to those who have travelled widely and those who have preferred not to leave their familiar surroundings.
De Botton presents us Xavier de Maistre, a Frenchman who, in 1790, undertook a journey around his bedroom, later entitling an account of what he had seen "Journey Around My Bedroom". In 1798, de Maistre went on a second journey. He travelled by night this time and went as far as the window-ledge, entitling a later account "Nocturnal Expedition Around My Bedroom".
The writer then contrasts de Maistre, whose entire luggage consisted of blue and pink cotton pyjamas, with Alexander von Humboldt, who undertook a journey around South America from 1799 to 1804. The German genius required thirty pieces of luggage, ten mules, four interpreters, two telescopes, a chronometer, a sextant, a compass, a barometer, a hygrometer, a gun and letters of introduction from the King of Spain.
In a critical passage about travelling, de Botton writes: "If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest — in all its ardour and paradoxes — than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside the constraints of work and the struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems — that is, issues requiring thoughts beyond the practical. We are inundated with advice on where to travel to; we hear little why and how we should go — though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia or human flourishing."
