Book Surgeon No. 27

Planning my trip to Japan, this week’s book, The Art of Travel by Alain De Botton, feels particularly relevant, bringing a philosophy of travel to paper. From the beginning, we are tasked with contemplating a critical question: why do we travel? Is it simply a search for awe or immediate pleasure? Is it to escape? Do we travel to learn? Botton writes about understanding the purpose of travel: “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 struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems – that is, issues requiring thought beyond the practical. We are inundated with advice on where to travel to; we hear little of 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.” Is there a relationship between travel and eudaimonia? How are our own lives changed by interacting with other cultures, by being a foreigner in a distant land? Are there pieces of our travel that we cannot learn in a book, or in a classroom? When we travel, we often tire ourselves more than we do at home. We take several hour flights, with layovers in cities we never planned to visit. We risk flight cancellations and delays, we give up our leg space to squeeze our backpacks under the seat in front of us, and we sleep in rooms much smaller than our homes–in cities where we often do not speak the native language. Why do we make these sacrifices? There are obviously many pleasurable aspects of travel–being cooked for, room service, better weather perhaps. But we can often find many of these things at home, or at least closer to home if we wanted. Nowadays, in any mid-sized city, you can find restaurants of a breadth of cuisines, serving up delicious food we have never heard of. If we wanted the comfort and treatment of a nice hotel, we could find one near our home, but we hardly take this route. There seems to be something particularly intriguing about a new, foreign land regardless of the sacrifice we make to get there. Asking why we travel is different for every trip, and there will often not be a satisfying answer. Yet, questions of why almost always bring us closer to the present and help us better understand our identity, which is largely defined by the actions we take.

A related question, and perhaps just as important, is how we travel? Botton draws light to the spaces between the activities in our itineraries. When we travel, we post pictures of the most significant moments, we tell our friends of this beach or that beach, but we hardly remember or share the full experience. Botton writes how “a travel book may tell us, for example, that a narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery, awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply journey through an afternoon. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out of the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties revolves in consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the opposing seats. We tap a finger on the window-ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where the ticket might be. We look back out at the field. It continues to rain. At last the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it stops inexplicably. A fly lands on the window. And we still might only have reached the end of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence ‘he journeyed through the afternoon.’” Clearly, this is not how many of us remember our journeys. We shorten our memories of our experiences and turn our adventures into highlight reels. While this behavior has its benefits, such as allowing us to hold onto particularly fond memories of our travels, it also leads the traveler to expect perfection. Thus, when such a traveler embarks on a journey and compares the often mundane moments of the present to the highlights of past travels, she will inevitably feel disappointed and anxious. Maybe there is a way for us to pay more attention to the non-glamorous in-between moments of our experiences in new places. In turn, how will focusing on the transitory details present, even the dull details, change our perceptions of our travels? Will our memories be different? Will our actual experiences change? 

Share with others if you enjoy! Thanks for reading and see you next week!