The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [67]
6.
De Maistre was not only a room traveller. He was also a great traveller in the classic sense. He journeyed to Italy and Russia, spent a winter with the royalist armies in the Alps and fought a Russian campaign in the Caucasus.
In an autobiographical note written in 1801 in South America, Alexander von Humboldt specified his motive for travelling: ‘I was spurred on by an uncertain longing to be transported from a boring daily life to a marvellous world.' It was this very dichotomy, ‘boring daily life' pitted against ‘marvellous world', that de Maistre had tried to redraw with greater subtlety. He would not have suggested to Humboldt that South America was dull; he merely would have urged him to consider that his native Berlin might have something to offer, too.
Eight decades later, Nietzsche, who had read and admired de Maistre (and spent much time in his own room), picked up on the thought:
When we observe how some people know how to manage their experiences—their insignificant, everyday experiences—so that they become an arable soil that bears fruit three times a year, while others—and how many there are!—are driven through surging waves of destiny, the most multifarious currents of the times and the nations, and yet always remain on top, bobbing like a cork, then we are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much.
There are some who have crossed deserts, floated on ice caps and cut their way through jungles but whose souls we would search in vain for evidence of what they have witnessed. Dressed in pink-and-blue pyjamas, satisfied within the confines of his own bedroom, Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Simon Prosser, Michele Hutchison, Caroline Dawnay, Miriam Gross, Noga Arikha, Nicole Aragi, Dan Frank and Oliver Klimpel.
Picture Acknowledgements
pp. 3, 237 Hammersmith Broadway from London A-Z Street Atlas (Reproduced by permission of Geographers' A-Z Map Co. Ltd. Licence No. B1299. This product includes mapping data licensed from Ordnance Survey®. © Crown Copyright 2001. Licence number 100017302)
pp. 3, 209 A Barbados beach (© Bob Krist/CORBIS)
p. 3 Portrait of Joris-Karl Huysmans (detail), photograph by Dornac (fl. 1890-1900) (Archives Larousse, Paris/Bridgeman Art Library)
p. 6 Tahiti Revisited, 1776, oil on canvas, by William Hodges (© National Maritime Museum, London)
p. 16 View of Alkmaar, c. 1670-75, oil on canvas, 44.4 X 43.4 cm, by Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael, Dutch (1628/9-82) (Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow Fund, 39.794. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Reproduced with permission. © 2000. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All Rights Reserved)
p. 27 Charles Baudelaire, c. 1860, photograph (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS)
p. 27 Edward Hopper, c. 1940, photograph by Oscar White (© Oscar White/CORBIS)
p. 50 Automat, 1927, oil on canvas, by Edward Hopper (© Francis G. Mayer/CORBIS)
p. 53 Gas, 1940, oil on canvas, 66.7 X 102.2 cm, by Edward Hopper (The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs Simon Guggenheim Fund. Photograph © 2001 The Museum of Modern Art, New York)
p. 55 Compartment C, Car 293, 1938, oil on canvas, by Edward Hopper (© Geoffrey Clements/CORBIS)
p. 60 Hotel Room, 1931, oil on canvas, by Edward Hopper (© Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid)
p. 65 Gustave Flaubert, photograph (© Bettmann/CORBIS)
p. 71 Doors and Bay- Windows in an Arab House (detail), 1832, watercolour and pencil drawing, by Eugene Delacroix (Departement des arts graphiques, Louvre/Photo: © RMN —Gerard Blot)
p. 82 Bazaar of the Silk Mercers, Cairo, lithograph by Louis Haghe after a drawing by David Roberts, from Egypt and Nubia, published by F. G. Moon, 1849, London (By permission of the British Library)
p. 84 Private Houses in Cairo, engraving from Edward William Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 1842, London