The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [5]
Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael, Vie-w of Alkmaar, c. 1670—75
Des Esseintes thus ended up in the paradoxical position of feeling more in Holland—that is, more intensely in contact with the elements he loved in Dutch culture—when looking at selected images of Holland in a museum than when travelling with sixteen pieces of luggage and two servants through the country itself.
6.
Awakening early that first morning, I slipped on a dressing gown provided by the hotel and went out onto the veranda. In the dawn light, the sky was a pale grey-blue, and after the rustlings of the night before, all the creatures and even the wind seemed in deep sleep. It was as quiet as a library. Beyond the hotel room stretched a wide beach whose fringe of coconut trees soon gave way to an unhindered sandy slope towards the sea. I climbed over the veranda's low railing and walked across the sand. Nature was at her most benevolent. It was as if, in creating this small horseshoe bay she had chosen to atone for her ill temper in other regions and decided for once to display only her munificence. The coconut trees provided shade and milk, the floor of the sea was lined with shells, the sand was powdery and the colour of sun-ripened wheat, and the air—even in the shade—had an enveloping, profound warmth to it so unlike the fragility of northern European heat, always prone to cede, even in midsummer, to a more assertive, proprietary chill.
I found a deck chair at the edge of the sea. I could hear small lapping sounds beside me, as if a kindly monster were taking discreet sips of water from a large goblet. A few birds were waking up and beginning to career through the air in matinal excitement. Behind me, the raffia roofs of the hotel bungalows were visible through gaps in the trees. Before me was a view that I recognised from the brochure: the beach stretching away in a gentle curve towards the tip of the bay with jungle-covered hills behind, and the first row of coconut trees inclining irregularly towards the turquoise sea, as though some of them were craning their necks to catch a better angle of the sun.
Yet this description only imperfectly reflects what occurred within me that morning, for my attention was in truth far more fractured and confused than the foregoing paragraphs suggest. I may have noticed a few birds careering through the air in matinal excitement, but my awareness of them was weakened by a number of other, incongruous and unrelated elements, among them a sore throat I had developed during the flight, worry over not having informed a colleague that I would be away, a pressure across both temples and a rising need to visit the bathroom. A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent: I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.
It is easy for us to forget ourselves when we contemplate pictorial and verbal descriptions of places. At home, as my eyes had panned over photographs of Barbados, there were no reminders that those eyes were intimately tied to a body and mind that would travel with me wherever I went and that might, over time, assert their presence in ways that would threaten or even negate the purpose of what the
eyes had come there to see. At home I could concentrate on pictures of a hotel room, a beach or a sky and ignore the complex creature in which this observation was taking place and for whom it was only a small part of a larger, more multifaceted task of living.
My body and mind were to prove temperamental accomplices in the mission of appreciating my destination. The body found it hard to sleep and complained of heat, flies and difficulties digesting hotel meals. The mind meanwhile revealed a commitment to anxiety, boredom, free-floating sadness and financial alarm.
It seems that unlike the continuous, enduring contentment