The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [48]
Although the landscape was not ugly, I could not—after a few moments of scrutiny—detect the charm so often ascribed to it. The olive trees looked stunted, more like bushes than like trees, and the wheat fields evoked the flat, dull expanses of southeastern England, where I had attended a school and been unhappy. I lacked the energy to register the barns, the limestone of the hills or the poppies growing at the feet of a group of cypresses.
Bored and uncomfortable in the Renault's increasingly hot plastic interior, I set off for my destination and greeted my hosts with the remark that this was simply paradise.
Because we find places to be beautiful as immediately and as apparently spontaneously as we find snow to be cold or sugar sweet, it is hard to imagine that there is anything we might do to alter or expand our attractions. It seems that matters have been decided for us by qualities inherent in the places themselves or by hardwiring in our psyches, and that we would therefore be as helpless to modify our sense of the places we find beautiful as we would our preference for the ice creams we find appetising.
Yet aesthetic tastes may be less rigid than this analogy suggests. We overlook certain places because nothing has ever prompted us to conceive of them as being worthy of appreciation, or because some unfortunate but random association has turned us against them. Thus our relationship to olive trees might be improved if we directed our attention towards the silver in their leaves or the structure of their branches; new associations might be created around wheat once we are directed to the pathos of this fragile and yet essential crop as its stalks bend their grain-filled heads in the wind. We might find something to appreciate in the skies of Provence once we are told, even if only in the crudest way that it is the shade of blue that counts.
And perhaps the most effective means of enriching our sense of what to look for in a scene is by studying visual art. We could conceive of many works of art as being immensely subtle instruments for telling us what amounts in effect to ‘Look at the sky of Provence, redraw your notion of wheat, do justice to olive trees.' From amidst the million things in, for example, a wheat field, a successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator. It will foreground elements ordinarily lost in the mass of data, stabilise them and, once we are acquainted with them, prompt us imperceptibly to find them in the world about us—or, if we have already found them, lend us the confidence to give them weight in our lives. We will be like a person around whom a word has been mentioned on many occasions, but who only begins to hear it once he or she has learnt its meaning.
And insofar as we travel in search of beauty, works of art may in small ways start to influence where we would like to travel to.
2.
Vincent van Gogh arrived in Provence at the end of February 1888. He was thirty-four years old and had dedicated himself to painting only eight years before, after failing in attempts to become first a teacher and then a priest. For the previous two years he had been living in Paris with his brother Theo, an art dealer, who supported him financially. He had had little artistic training but had befriended Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and exhibited his work alongside theirs at the Café du Tambourin on the Boulevard de Clichy.
‘I can still remember vividly how excited I became that winter when travelling from Paris to Aries,' van Gogh would recall of his sixteen-hour train journey to Provence. On his arrival in what was then the most prosperous town in the region and a centre for the olive trade and railway engineering, van Gogh carried his bags in the snow (an exceptional ten inches had fallen that day) to the small Hotel Carrel, not far from Aries's northern ramparts. Despite the weather and the small size of his room, he was enthusiastic about his southerly move. As he told his sister, ‘I believe that