The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [10]
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.