The art of travel
Any Baedeker will tell us wherewe ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us howand why. With the same intelligence and insouciant charm he brought to How Proust Can Save Your Life, de Botton considers the pleasures of anticipation; the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything from a seascape in Barbados to the takeoffs at Heathrow. Even as de Botton takes the reader along on his own peregrinations, he also cites such distinguished fellow-travelers as Baudelaire, Wordsworth, Van Gogh, the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, and the 18th-century eccentric Xavier de Maistre, who catalogued the wonders of his bedroom. The Art of Travelis a wise and utterly original book. Don't leave home without it.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2014–2026years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Art of Travel, by Alain de Botton https://g.co/kgs/3WZtk1 . I highly recommend it!
- The big problem I see is that planning does in a lot of ways remove the essence of travelling (see The Art Of Travel by Alain De Botton). The best trips I've been on have been largely unplanned and taken on a day to day basis which flies in the face of a single up front plan which is built once and referred to throughout the trip.
What I do see a market for are the tools which sit in the middle and enhance your ability to plan once your in a location. Tools like:
- flight management - hotel booking management - local knowledge resources - tools for connecting with locals - language tools
A lot of these are already available in various forms through dedicated applications. I use kayak, hostel bookers, app in the air, wiki travel plus local subway and language apps. Whether there could be an advantage to it all being in one place I'm not sure but the tools on their own seem to do pretty well once you've put together your toolset.
- Reminds me of this quote from Tonya Riley's _The Staff Engineer's Path_:
> In The Art of Travel (Vintage), Alain de Botton talks about the frustration of learning new information that doesn’t connect to anything you already know—like the sorts of facts you might pick up while visiting a historic building in a foreign land. He writes about visiting Madrid’s Iglesia de San Francisco el Grande and learning that “the sixteenth-century stalls in the sacristy and chapter house come from the Cartuja de El Paular, the Carthusian monastery near Segovia.” Without a connection back to something he was already familiar with, the description couldn’t spark his excitement or curiosity. The new facts, he wrote, were “as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.”
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