I am reading The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton one of my favorite writers of my younger years. Years ago when he was a relatively a new arrival on the scene and he had just published Essays in Love, I wrote to him about how much I loved that book and his style. He wrote me a short but nice reply. I recall the warm happy feeling of closing the loop. So many years later reading The Art of Travel, it is familiar territory - his style has mellowed with age, but its still recognizably his but as reader and writer it feels like our paths have diverged over time and with age - I was not able to like this book nearly as much as I did Essays in Love. His description of monitors in airports is matches what many of us have experienced or imagined:
The constant calls of the screens, some accompanied by the impatient pulsing of a cursor, suggest with what ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered were we simply to walk down a corridor and onto a craft that in a few hours would land us in a place of which we had no memories and where no one knew our name. How pleasant to hold in mind through the crevasses of our moods, at three in the afternoon, when lassitude and despair threaten, that there is always a plane taking off for somewhere, for Baudelaire’s ‘anywhere! anywhere!’: Trieste, Zurich, Paris.
What if I got on the wrong plane by accident or design and somehow landed in a strange city in a foreign country and just continued to live there atleast until the next unplanned adventure. Ofcourse, my own life would not support such "flights of fancy" but there are those who can actually do that. I knew someone a long time ago who liked to pick a place to travel by throwing darts on a map. I found the concept so thrilling and so out of reach for me. I can't say I was envious but just a bit in awe of what is possible.
Comments