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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}