On board a KLM 747 to Amsterdam, I’m reading Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel as a preparation exercise for the TEDGlobal conference in two weeks.
De Botton's musings on travel are the required reading for a frequent traveler like me – a collection of mundane “running to stand still” moments, filled with memorable lines that affect you exactly the way traveling does: they are glimpses of greater meaning, a rejuvenating exposure to “otherness” that not only expands your horizon but also makes you believe again in the naïve assumption that the skies are friendly. It is a book about seeing the unseen (which is not necessarily the unknown). John Ruskin, the painter, is portrayed in a chapter on “Possessing Beauty,” and he chastises the hastiness of modern travelers: “The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he truly be a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.”
The most remarkable paragraph in the book, however, introduces Xavier de Maistre and his novel A Journey around My Room, the detailed account of a miniature travel experience from sofa to bed and back (with some notable digressions), and a defiant attempt to take Pascal’s famous adage ad absurdum: “The source of all of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” Maistre does not know either but at least he is capable of keeping his itinerary limited to an absolute minimum. There are “those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much,” de Botton quotes Nietzsche, before concluding: “Satisfied with the confines of his own bedroom, Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen.”
