The Art of Travel

by Alain De Botton

  The building was architecturally miserable, it smelt of frying oil and lemon-scented floor polish, the food was glutinous and the tables were dotted with islands of dried ketchup from the meals of long-departed travellers, yet something about the scene moved me. There was poetry in this forsaken service station perched on the ridge of the motorway, far from all habitation. Its appeal made me think of certain other equally and unexpectedly poetic travelling places—airport terminals, harbours, train stations and motels—and the work of a nineteenth-century writer and a twentieth-century painter he inspired, who were, in their different ways, unusually alive to the power of the liminal travelling place.

  2.

  Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821. From an early age, he felt uncomfortable at home. His father died when he was five, and a year later his mother married a man her son disliked. He was sent to a succession of boarding schools from which he was repeatedly expelled for insubordination. As an adult, he could find no place in bourgeois society. He quarrelled with his mother and stepfather, wore theatrical black capes and hung reproductions of Delacroix's Hamlet lithographs around his bedroom. In his diary, he complained of suffering from ‘that appalling disease: the Horror of Home' and from a ‘feeling of loneliness, from earliest childhood. Despite the family—and with school friends especially—a feeling of being destined to lead an eternally solitary life.'

  He dreamt of leaving France for somewhere else, somewhere far away, on another continent, with no reminders of ‘the everyday' (a term of horror for the poet)—somewhere with warmer weather, a place, in the words of the legendary couplet from Limitation au Voyage, where everything would be ‘ordre et beauté/Luxe, calme etvolupté'. But he was aware of the difficulties involved. He had once left the leaden skies of northern France and returned dejected. He had set off on a journey to India. Three months into the sea crossing, the ship had run into a storm and had stopped in Mauritius for repairs. It was the lush, palm-fringed island that Baudelaire had dreamt of. But he could not shake off a feeling of lethargy and sadness, and he suspected that India would be no better. Despite efforts by the captain to persuade him otherwise, he insisted on sailing back to France.

  The result was a lifelong ambivalence towards travel. In Le Voyage, he sarcastically imagined the accounts of travellers returned from afar:

  We saw stars

  And waves; we saw sands, too; And despite many crises and unforeseen disasters,

  We were often bored, just as we are here.

  And yet he remained sympathetic to the wish to travel and observed its tenacious hold on him. No sooner had he returned to Paris from his Mauritian trip than he began to dream once again of going somewhere else. Noting, ‘Life is a hospital in which every patient is obsessed with changing beds: this one wants to suffer in front of the radiator, and that one thinks he'd get better if he was by the window,' he was nevertheless unashamed to count himself among the patients: ‘It always seems to me that I'll be well where I am not, and this question of moving is one that I'm forever entertaining with my soul.' Sometimes Baudelaire dreamt of going to Lisbon. It would be warm there, and he would, like a lizard, gain strength from stretching himself out in the sun. It was a city of water, marble and light, conducive to thought and calm. But almost from the moment he conceived this Portuguese fantasy, he would start to wonder if he might not be happier in Holland. Then again, why not Java or the Baltic or even the North Pole, where he could bathe in shadows and watch comets fly across the Arctic skies? The destination was not really the point. The true desire was to get away—to go, as he concluded, ‘anywhere! anywhere! so long as it is out of the world!'

  Baudelaire honoured reveries of travel as a mark of those noble, questing souls whom he described as ‘poets', who could not be satisfied with the horizons of home even as they appreciated the limits of other lands, whose temperaments oscillated between hope and despair, childlike idealism and cynicism. It was the fate of poets, like Christian pilgrims, to live in a fallen world while refusing to surrender their vision of an alternative, less compromised realm.

  Against such ideas, one detail stands out in Baudelaire's biography: he was, throughout his life, strongly drawn to harbours, docks, railway stations, trains, ships and hotel rooms, and felt more at home in the transient places of travel than in his own dwelling. When he was oppressed by the atmosphere in Paris, when the world seemed ‘monotous and small', he would leave, ‘leave for leaving's sake', and travel to a harbour or train station, where he would inwardly exclaim:

  Carriage, take me with you! Ship, steal me away from here!

  Take me far, far away. Here the mud is made of our tears!

  In an essay on the poet, T. S. Eliot proposed that Baudelaire was the first nineteenth-century artist to give expression to the beauty of modern travelling places and machines. ‘Baudelaire… invented a new kind of romantic nostalgia,' wrote Eliot: ‘the poesie des departs, the poesie des sattes d'attente! And, one might add, the poesie des stations-service and the poesie des aéroports.

  3.

  When feeling sad at home, I have often boarded a train or airport bus and gone to Heathrow, where, from an observation gallery in Terminal 2 or from the top floor of the Renaissance Hotel along the north runway, I have drawn comfort from the sight of the ceaseless landings and takeoffs of aircraft.

  In the difficult year of 1859, in the aftermath of the Fleurs du Mal trial and his breakup with his mistress Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire visited his mother at her home in Honfleur and, for much of his two-month stay, occupied a chair at the quayside, watching vessels docking and departing. ‘Those large and beautiful ships, invisibly balanced (hovering) on tranquil waters, those hardy ships that look dreamy and idle, don't they seem to whisper to us in silent tongues: ‘When shall we set sail for happiness?'

  Seen from a car park beside 09L/27R, as the north runway is known to pilots, the 747 appears at first as a small, brilliant white light, a star dropping towards earth. It has been in the air for twelve hours. It took off from Singapore in the late morning. It flew over the Bay of Bengal, Delhi, the Afghan desert and the Caspian Sea. It traced a course over Romania, the Czech Republic and southern Germany before beginning its descent, so gently that few passengers would have even noticed a change of tone in the engines, above the grey-brown, turbulent waters off the Dutch coast. It followed the Thames over London, turned north near Hammersmith (where the flaps began to unfold), pivoted over Uxbridge and straightened course over Slough. From the ground, the white light gradually takes shape as a vast, two-storeyed body with four engines suspended like earrings beneath implausibly long wings. In the light rain, clouds of water form a veil behind the plane on its matronly progress towards the airfield. Beneath it are the suburbs of Slough. It is three in the afternoon. In detached villas, kettles are being filled. A television is on in a living room, its sound switched off. Green and red shadows move silently across walls. The everyday. And above Slough is a plane that a few hours ago was flying over the Caspian Sea. Slough/the Caspian: the plane a symbol of worldliness, carrying within itself a trace of all the lands it has crossed, its eternal mobility offering an imaginative counterweight to feelings of stagnation and confinement.

  This morning the plane was over the Malay Peninsula, a place-name in which there linger the smells of guava and sandalwood. And now, a few metres above the earth that it has avoided for so long, the plane appears motionless, its nose raised upwards, seeming to pause before its sixteen rear wheels meet the tarmac with a blast of smoke that makes manifest its speed and weight.

  On a parallel runway, an A340 ascends for New York and, over the Staines Reservoir, retracts its flaps and wheels, which it won't require again until the descent over the white clapboard houses of Long Beach, three thousand miles and eight hours of sea-and-cloud away. Visible through the heat haze of turbofans, other planes wait to start their journeys. All across the airfield, planes are on the move, their fins a confusion of colours against the grey horizon, like sails at
a regatta.

  Along the glass-and-steel back of Terminal 3 rest four giants, whose liveries indicate a varied provenance: Canada, Brazil, Pakistan, Korea. For a few hours their wingtips will lie only a few metres apart, until each set begins another journey into the stratospheric winds. As every ship turns into a gate, a choreographed dance begins. Trucks slip to the underbelly, black fuel hoses are fastened to the wings, a gangway bends its rectangular rubber lips over the fuselage. The doors of the holds are opened to disgorge battered aluminium cargo crates, perhaps containing fruit that only a few days ago hung from the branches of tropical trees, or vegetables that had their roots in the soil of high, silent valleys. Two men in overalls set up a small ladder next to one engine and open up its casing to reveal an intricate terrain of wires and small steel pipes. Sheets and pillows are lowered from the front of one cabin. Passengers disembark; for them this ordinary English afternoon will have a supernatural tinge.

  Nowhere is the appeal of the airport more concentrated than in the television screens that hang in rows from the terminal ceilings to announce the departure and arrival of flights, whose absence of aesthetic self-consciousness and whose workmanlike casing and pedestrian typefaces do nothing to disguise their emotional charge and imaginative allure. Tokyo, Amsterdam, Istanbul; Warsaw, Seattle, Rio. The screens bear all the poetic resonance of the last line of James Joyce's Ulysses, which is at once a record of where the novel was written and, no less important, a symbol of the cosmopolitan spirit behind its composition: ‘Trieste, Zurich, Paris.' The constant calls of the screens, some accompanied by the impatient pulsing of a cursor, suggest with what ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered were we simply to walk down a corridor and onto a craft that in a few hours would land us in a place of which we had no memories and where no one knew our name. How pleasant to hold in mind through the crevasses of our moods, at three in the afternoon, when lassitude and despair threaten, that there is always a plane taking off for somewhere, for Baudelaire's ‘anywhere! anywhere!': Trieste, Zurich, Paris.

  4.

  Baudelaire admired not only the places of departure and arrival but also the machines of motion, and in particular oceangoing ships. He wrote, for example, of the ‘profound and mysterious charm that arises from looking at a ship'. He went to see the flat-bottomed boats, or caboteurs, in the Port Saint Nicolas in Paris, and larger ships in Rouen and the Normandy ports. He marvelled at the technological achievements behind them, at how objects so heavy and multifarious could be made to move with elegance and cohesion across the seas. A great ship made him think of ‘a vast, immense, complicated but agile creature, an animal full of spirit, suffering and heaving all the sighs and ambitions of humanity'.

  We may feel similar sentiments upon looking at some of the larger species of aeroplanes, themselves ‘vast' and ‘complicated' creatures, which defy their size and the chaos of the lower atmosphere to steer serenely across the firmament. On seeing such a thing parked at a gate, dwarfing luggage carts and mechanics, one is induced to feel surprise, overriding any scientific explanation, that it can move even a few metres, let alone fly to Japan. Buildings, among the few man-made structures of comparable size, do not prepare us for the aeroplane's agility or self-possession, for buildings may be cracked by slight movements of the earth, and they leak air and water and can lose parts of themselves to the wind.

  Few seconds in life are more releasing than those in which a plane ascends to the sky. Looking out a window from inside a machine standing stationary at the beginning of a runway, we face a vista of familiar proportions: a road, oil cylinders, grass and hotels with copper-tinted windows—the earth as we have always known it, where we make slow progress, even with the help of a car, where calf muscles and engines strain to reach the summit of hills, where, half a mile ahead or less, there is almost always a line of trees or buildings to restrict our view. Then suddenly, accompanied by the controlled rage of the engines (with only a slight tremor from glasses in the galley), we rise fluently into the atmosphere, and an immense horizon opens up across which we can wander without impediment. A journey that on earth would have taken an afternoon can be accomplished with an infinitesimal movement of the eye; we can cross Berkshire, visit Maidenhead, skirt over Bracknell and survey the M4.

  There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane's ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.

  The new vantage point lends order and logic to the landscape: roads curve to avoid hills, rivers trace paths to lakes, pylons lead from power stations to towns, streets that from earth seemed laid out without thought emerge as well-planned grids. The eye attempts to match what it can see with what the mind knows should be there, like a reader trying to decipher a familiar book in a new language. Those lights must be Newbury that road the A33 as it leaves the M4. And to think that all along, hidden from our sight, our lives were that small: the world we live in but almost never see, the way we must appear to the hawk and to the gods.

  The plane's engines show none of the effort required to take us to this place. They hang there in the inconceivable cold, patiently and invisibly powering the craft, their sole requests, painted on their inner flanks in red letters, being that we do not walk on them and that we feed them ‘Oil only: D50TFI-S4', a message for a forthcoming set of men in overalls, 4,000 miles away and still asleep.

  There is not much talk about the clouds that are visible up here. No one seems to think it remarkable that somewhere above an ocean we are flying past a vast white candy-floss island that would have made a perfect seat for an angel or even God himself in a painting by Piero della Francesca. In the cabin, no one stands up to announce with requisite emphasis that if we look out the window, we will see that we are flying over a cloud, a matter that would have detained Leonardo and Poussin, Claude and Constable.

  Food that if sampled in a kitchen would have been banal or even offensive acquires a new taste and interest in the presence of the clouds (like a picnic of bread and cheese that delights us when we

  eat it on a clifftop above a pounding sea). With the in-flight tray, we make ourselves at home in this unhomely place: we appropriate the extraterrestrial landscape with the help of a chilled bread roll and a plastic dish of potato salad.

  When scrutinised, our airborne companions outside the window do not look as we might expect them to. In paintings and from the ground, they appear to be horizontal ovoids, but up here they resemble giant obelisks made of piles of unsteady shaving foam. Their kinship with steam becomes clearer: they seem more volatile, perhaps the product of something that has just exploded and is still mutating. It remains perplexing that it should be impossible to sit on one.

  Baudelaire knew how to love the clouds.

  THE OUTSIDER

  Tell me, whom do you love most, you enigmatic man: your father, your

  mother, your sister or your brother?

  I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.

  Your friends?

  You ‘re using a word I've never understood.

  Your country?

  I don't know where that might lie.

  Beauty?

  I would love her with all my heart, if only she were a goddess and immortal.

  Money?

  I hate it as you hate God.

  Well, then, what do you love, you strange outsider?

  I love the clouds … the clouds that pass by… over there… over

  there… those lovely clouds!

  The clouds usher in tranquillity. Below us are enemies and colleagues, the sites of our terrors and our griefs, all of them now infinitesimal, mere scratches on the earth. We may know this old lesson in perspective well enough, but rarely does it seem as true as when we are pressed against the cold plane window, our craft a teacher of profound philosophy and a faithful dis
ciple of the Baudelairean command:

  Carriage, take me with you! Ship, steal me away from here!

  Take me far, far away. Here the mud is made of our tears!

  5.

  There was, apart from the motorway, no road linking the service station to other places—not even a footpath. It seemed to belong not to the city nor to the country, either, but rather to some third, travellers' realm, like a lighthouse at the edge of the ocean.

  This geographical isolation enforced the atmosphere of solitude in the dining area. The lighting was unforgiving, bringing out pallor and blemishes. The chairs and seats, painted in childishly bright colours, had the strained jollity of a fake smile. No one was talking, no one admitting to curiosity or fellow feeling. We gazed blankly past one another at the serving counter or out into the darkness. We might have been seated among rocks.

  I remained in one corner, eating fingers of chocolate and taking occasional sips of orange juice. I felt lonely, but for once it was a gentle, even pleasant kind of loneliness, because rather than unfolding against a backdrop of laughter and fellowship, which would have caused me to suffer from the contrast between my mood and the environment, it had as its locus a place where everyone was a stranger, where the difficulties of communication and the frustrated longing for love seemed to be acknowledged and brutally celebrated by the architecture and lighting.

  The collective loneliness brought to mind certain canvases by Edward Hopper, which, despite the bleakness they depict, are not themselves bleak to look at but rather allow the viewer to witness an echo of his or her own grief and thereby to feel less personally persecuted and beset by it. It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.