Alain De Botton

An inquiry into the human desire to travel and the ways in which the travel experience is affected by anticipation and memory presents a series of thought-provoking and humorous essays on airports, museums, landscapes, holiday romances, hotel mini-bars, and master artists, offering suggestions on how to render travel more fulfilling. Reprint. 65,000 first printing.

The Art of Travel

Bilge Ince

Of all modes of transport, the train is perhaps the best aid to thought: the views have none of the potential monotony of those on a ship or plane, they move fast enough for us not to get exasperated but slowly enough to allow us to identify objects.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places.

But there may be a more profound pleasure: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new, but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland could provide.

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasim nor does it arise from sentiments of which non-artists are devoid; it merely contributes to enthusiasm, and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.

The Art of Travel quotes

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