The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [9]
The building was architecturally miserable, it smelt of frying oil and lemon-scented floor polish, the food was glutinous and the tables were dotted with islands of dried ketchup from the meals of long-departed travellers, yet something about the scene moved me. There was poetry in this forsaken service station perched on the ridge of the motorway, far from all habitation. Its appeal made me think of certain other equally and unexpectedly poetic travelling places—airport terminals, harbours, train stations and motels—and the work of a nineteenth-century writer and a twentieth-century painter he inspired, who were, in their different ways, unusually alive to the power of the liminal travelling place.
2.
Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821. From an early age, he felt uncomfortable at home. His father died when he was five, and a year later his mother married a man her son disliked. He was sent to a succession of boarding schools from which he was repeatedly expelled for insubordination. As an adult, he could find no place in bourgeois society. He quarrelled with his mother and stepfather, wore theatrical black capes and hung reproductions of Delacroix's Hamlet lithographs around his bedroom. In his diary, he complained of suffering from ‘that appalling disease: the Horror of Home' and from a ‘feeling of loneliness, from earliest childhood. Despite the family—and with school friends especially—a feeling of being destined to lead an eternally solitary life.'
He dreamt of leaving France for somewhere else, somewhere far away, on another continent, with no reminders of ‘the everyday' (a term of horror for the poet)—somewhere with warmer weather, a place, in the words of the legendary couplet from Limitation au Voyage, where everything would be ‘ordre et beauté/Luxe, calme etvolupté'. But he was aware of the difficulties involved. He had once left the leaden skies of northern France and returned dejected. He had set off on a journey to India. Three months into the sea crossing, the ship had run into a storm and had stopped in Mauritius for repairs. It was the lush, palm-fringed island that Baudelaire had dreamt of. But he could not shake off a feeling of lethargy and sadness, and he suspected that India would be no better. Despite efforts by the captain to persuade him otherwise, he insisted on sailing back to France.
The result was a lifelong ambivalence towards travel. In Le Voyage, he sarcastically imagined the accounts of travellers returned from afar:
We saw stars
And waves; we saw sands, too; And despite many crises and unforeseen disasters,
We were often bored, just as we are here.
And yet he remained sympathetic to the wish to travel and observed its tenacious hold on him. No sooner had he returned to Paris from his Mauritian trip than he began to dream once again of going somewhere else. Noting, ‘Life is a hospital in which every patient is obsessed with changing beds: this one wants to suffer in front of the radiator, and that one thinks he'd get better if he was by the window,' he was nevertheless unashamed to count himself among the patients: ‘It always seems to me that I'll be well where I am not, and this question of moving is one that I'm forever entertaining with my soul.' Sometimes Baudelaire dreamt of going to Lisbon. It would be warm there, and he would, like a lizard, gain strength from stretching himself out in the sun. It was a city of water, marble and light, conducive to thought and calm. But almost from the moment he conceived this Portuguese fantasy, he would start to wonder if he might not be happier in Holland. Then again, why not Java or the Baltic or even the North Pole, where he could bathe in shadows and watch comets fly across the Arctic skies?