What about the art of traveling?

The Art of Travel is a book written by Alain de Botton and translated by Nan Zhiguo, which received rave reviews after its publication in Britain. Allen. De Botton revealed the deep meaning of travel to us in The Art of Travel. He believes that travel and the study of travel can deepen people's experience of happiness, which is what the ancient Greek philosophers called "happiness brought by an active life dominated by reason."

The return of humanity

As the name implies, The Art of Travel is not a narrative of adventures on the trip, nor a landscape film written with a pen, but a reflection on the significance of travel. He injected a lot of thoughts about culture, art and even the meaning of life itself into his trip, which made the original journey full of all kinds of fresh colors.

For those who can only pack their bags and travel on a few public holidays a year, what is more worth looking forward to is the process itself. Many people simply have no time to think about the motivation of traveling. But it was from here that De Botton began to explore the meaning of travel. Even some places that are often overlooked in travel are integrated into his philosophical thinking. It is this keen sense of looking for meaning everywhere that makes De Botton's trip different from what we usually expect. Without his reminder, I'm afraid we all forgot that travel can express another meaning of life besides hard work and hard work.

It is difficult to leave anything in the minds of ordinary travelers during the take-off of the plane, but in De Botton's view, "the take-off of the plane brings pleasure to our hearts, because the rapid rise of the plane is the best symbol to realize the turning point of life ... The cloud brings a kind of silence. Below us is the place where we are afraid and sad. There are our enemies and colleagues. Now they are all on the ground, insignificant and insignificant. "

The journey led by this thought is destined to be a philosophical journey. We have to admire this talent's driving ability. The place he went to may not be too unexpected, but when Wordsworth became the guide of the trip to the Lake District of England, Van Gogh's paintings led our trip to Provence, and Flaubert became the guide of Amsterdam, you suddenly found that travel gave you a new meaning. "Before the mind is intoxicated with the scenery in front of it/A dazzling dance is fleeting/Nature moderately presents something eternal (Wordsworth)". If travel has a meaning different from daily life, then its meaning or art lies in that you can find what you ignore through travel, and these things have a more eternal meaning than daily life. This meaning includes our enthusiasm for the known environment, our yearning for the unknown, and the real joy of life found in the interaction with the surrounding environment.

Interestingly, the last part of the book is about returning to his study after the trip, but the trip is not over, because a person who is passionate about life can complete a trip even between rooms.

The art of traveling is that it can lead travelers back to a truly natural state, not a distorted state, so the artistic journey is also a life journey with inner experience. Everyone's true self is not completely lost in the busy time. All we need is a kind of guidance, and it is at the invitation of De Botton that Baudelaire, Pascal and Wordsworth helped us to complete a return to humanity.

Spiritual thinking

As a kind of historical and cultural prose, De Botton's The Art of Travel is easier to play the "cultural card", which seems to dissect "travel" as an entity. From preparation, to thinking about the motivation, to discussing the scenery and art seen during the trip, and finally to returning after the trip, De Botton is often good at finding suitable celebrity stories from western culture to explain the trip. While telling his own travel stories, the author always compares them with the European cultural background, which makes his Travel Analysis have a deep sense of history and cultural brand. For example, when discussing "specific places in travel", he conveniently brought Baudelaire's obsession with ports, docks, railway stations, trains, ships and hotel rooms; This paper discusses the "motivation of travel", taking Flaubert's yearning for exotic oriental customs as an example. Writing "Scenery in Travel" describes Wordsworth's life in the lake area many years ago, and at the same time writes his own trip to the lake area; Talking about "art in travel" is to get to the bottom of the intimate relationship between Provence and Van Gogh and point out the shaping power of travel on Van Gogh's paintings. The alternation of history and reality seems to be a montage designed by the author, which inadvertently pulls out the power of scholar-like prose in the depths of time: the meaning of travel is not to see the scenery and humanities, nor to pursue the enjoyment of the body, but to find an environment for dialogue with the soul. This kind of environment can often inspire us to think about life itself and life situation, and it is a rare spiritual catalyst for artists.