Feeling Between

Koch Gallery, Between WorldsWhy is this course titled The Art of Travel? Is de Botton’s book an inspiration, a guide? Maybe the de Botton’s philosophy and that of this course line up. But there is very little controlled pedagogy at work on a blog populated by posts from students scattered around the world. We are ideally learning the art of travel, or at least depicting the experience of travel. But why? I’ve wondered about the purpose of this blog since I’ve started to place myself within it and I’ve realized that people use it for different reasons. Some want to rant, some to make sense of what they are seeing, some to communicate with others and find or speak to a common feeling. Alain de Botton is trying to describe how he and other experience travel and if there is an art to it I believe mastery has something to do with how one sees themselves in different contexts.

De Botton writes about anxieties overtaking him in Tahiti, about Flaubert the Egyptian, and about the neither-here-nor-there of traveling spaces. In his chapter on the exotic he writes about the urge to live in Amsterdam when he sees a delightfully different apartment notably without curtains which communicate openness and modesty. I have been walking around Buenos Aires and felt a similar twinge. The sky is blue and the sun is warm except on occasional rainy days. The food is better; less processed and more influenced by Italians. There are more book stores than anywhere else that I have been. There are even book stands (not tables by Bobst but stands!) and classic texts next to soft-core porn at your average news kiosk. Botton says that the exotic must not only be different but seem an improvement and to me these things mark improvements. I do not think of the racism or the poverty and violence. These are constants in every country if not every urban setting and I am getting used to them here.

I wonder if de Botton thinks travel can change us permanently, make us different somehow. I doubt it. Travel may present one with new ideas and customs but I do not think one will return fundamentally different. But I think that people want to return changed in many cases. My wish is that I become less introverted here. I hope that some of the culture of closeness, of fits of laughter and yelling to friends from across the street or from apartment windows will spur me to so the same. I’m realizing that I have no idea how I thought this process would happen. If I lived here, maybe. No. I think this type of change is up to me. I am between introverted and extroverted, uncomfortable with starting conversations but longing for them. I wonder if de Botton would agree that people can feel like hotels and train cars, between one idea of self and another. I think he would because I think that most people feel like they are in transit and look for a comfortable place to settle, at least until they feel restless.

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