"The Art of Travel"

Alain de Boton in his “The Art of Travel”, which is about artists and travel, not travel as as an art, draws attention to such writers as Baudelaire, whom T. S. Eliot said was “the first 19c traveller to give expression to the beauty of modern travelling places and machines, a kind of romantic nostalgia”. He admired not only the places of departure and arrival, but also the machines used. Ships, in particular, “have a profound and mysterious charm that arises from just looking at them”. John Betjeman, also, is able to evoke nostalgia in a certain style of travel. Baudelaire spent a lot of time at railway stations and ports. He had a major influence on the American artist, Edward Hopper, who was in Paris as a student in the early 19c. It is not just the scenes, but moreover the atmosphere of loneliness, isolation and poignancy, that arise from his paintings. Hopper also had an interest in trains and their associates. A half-empty carriage, dreaminess fostered by landscape, the rhythm of movement of the train and the sounds from the rail lines outside. In these environs one can be at one with thoughts and memories, in a timeless capsule.

The train, of all types of transport, may be the best aid to thought, with glimpses, though brief, but long enough to identify objects, or private domains. You can follow an object, through the window, or a scene, in a panning of perception, till the next one appears in one’s view, the previous one now out of sight and mind. This is more real than celebrity. One can become aware of the present through other peoples’ lives. This is a fly on the wall existence. The unfamiliar is the most eye-catching.

This is a process of travelling without reference to a destination, which connects us to our senses and experiences. Symbols of the abroad, chaos, richness, or even such a thing as a shitting donkey in a shop, which so fascinated Flaubert on a visit to Egypt and where a young boy cried out a greeting to him, “I wish you all kinds of prosperity, especially a long dick”.