The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [47]
There is a strictly religious message here. God assures Job that he has a place in his heart, even if all events do not centre around him and may at times appear to run contrary to his interest. When divine wisdom eludes human understanding, the righteous, made aware of their limitations by the spectacle of sublime nature, must continue to trust in God's plans for the universe.
8.
But the religious answer to Job's question does not invalidate the story for secular spirits. Sublime landscapes, through their grandeur and power, retain a symbolic role in bringing us to accept without bitterness or lamentation the obstacles that we cannot overcome and the events that we cannot make sense of. As the Old Testament God
knew, it can be helpful to back up deflationary points about mankind with reference to the very elements in nature which physically surpass it—the mountains, the girdle of the earth, the deserts.
If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. Sublime places gently move us to acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming. But it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time in them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
ART
VII
On Eye-Opening Art
1.
One summer I was invited to spend a few days with friends in a farmhouse in Provence. I knew that the word Provence was for many people rich in associations, though it meant little to me. I tended to switch off at its mention, out of a sense, founded on little, that the place would not be congenial to me. What I did know was that Provence was generally held by sensible people to be very beautiful—'Ah, Provence!' they would sigh, with a reverence otherwise reserved for opera or Delft porcelain.
I flew to Marseilles and, after renting a small Renault at the airport, headed for the home of my hosts, which lay at the foot of the Alpilles hills, between the towns of Aries and Saint-Rémy At the exit out of Marseilles, I grew confused and ended up at the giant oil refinery at Fos-sur-Mer, whose tangle of pipes and cooling towers spoke of the complexity involved in the manufacture of a liquid that I was used to putting into my car with scant thought for its origins.
I found my way back to the N568, which led me inland across the wheat-growing plain of La Crau. Outside the village of Saint-Martin-de-Crau, a few miles from my destination, being too early, I pulled off the road and turned off the engine. I had come to a stop on the edge of an olive grove. It was quiet save for the sounds made by cicadas hidden in the trees. Behind the grove were wheat fields bordered by a row of cypresses, over whose tops rose the irregular ridge of the Alpilles hills. The sky was a cloudless blue.
I scanned the view. I was not looking for anything in particular—not for predators, holiday homes or memories. My motive was simple and hedonistic: I was looking for beauty. ‘Delight and enliven me' was my implicit challenge to the olive trees, cypresses and skies of Provence. It was a vast, loose agenda, and my eyes were bewildered at their freedom. Without the motives that had marked the rest of the day—to seek out the airport, the exit out of Marseilles and so on—they careered from object to object, so that if their path had been traced by the mark of a giant pencil, the sky would soon have been darkened by random