The Art of Travel by Alain de BottonPantheon, 2002 (originally Hamish Hamilton, 2002)

Really smart and pleasing: I’ve so loved reading this book on my train rides to and from work this week. de Botton examines the motives and logic of travel: why we leave home, and what leaving home might teach us. The book is nine chapters, each covering a place or places and each with a “guide”: an artist or thinker or traveler whose experiences might be a lens through which to see some broader phenomenon. de Botton uses the work of J.K. Huysmans, for example, to look at the pleasure and trouble of anticipation: the way that dreaming of a place can color our experience of it, the way that anticipation leaves out so much of ordinary life and daily annoyances, which have a way of popping up wherever we are. de Botton’s prose is graceful and his arguments interesting: the chapter “On Possessing Beauty,” about Ruskin, drawing, and how to keep a place with us when we leave was especially resonant. Ruskin’s idea that to draw or make “word-paintings,” even if you’re not a skilled artist or writer, can bring happiness by making you experience a place more fully makes sense to me. Slowing down and noticing things changes how you look at a place, brings a shift in perspective. “Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with,” de Botton writes, in his discussion of Wordsworth (p 147): travel and art alike can offer an antidote.