The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton
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The Art of Travel

Updated: 7 Sep 2020
Any Baedeker will tell us where we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us how and why. With the same intelligence and insouciant charm he brought to How Proust Can Save Your Life, de Botton considers the pleasures of anticipation; the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything from a seascape in Barbados to the takeoffs at Heathrow. Even as de Botton takes the reader along on his own peregrinations, he also cites such distinguished fellow-travelers as Baudelaire, Wordsworth, Van Gogh, the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, and the 18th-century eccentric Xavier de Maistre, who catalogued the wonders of his bedroom. The Art of Travel is a wise and utterly original book. Don’t leave home without it.
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In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton writes about the problem with modern tourism. Travel is the physical pursuit of happiness, but we are so blinded by our haste that we look at everything and see nothing. We travel so far and so fast that we have an inability to derive pleasure from the places we are experiencing. Our attempts to capture experiences is usually reserved for photography. Alain says, “The camera blurs the distinction between looking and noticing, between seeing and possessing; it may give us the option of true knowledge, but it may also unwittingly make the effort of acquiring that knowledge seem superfluous.” .. .. In my trip to Arles, I was reminded when we do finally slow down, we see what was before us the entire time.
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