DEPARTURE
On Anticipation
J.-K. Huysman
Have you ever been somewhere beautiful or exciting but still felt unhappy? Describe your experience.
Note how de Botton evokes a desire for travel on p5-8 “By December… tinged orange by the city’s street-lights” with William Hodges Tahiti Revisited, 1776 printed on a double spread in the middle. What negative images does he create? How? What positive images does he create? How? What is the effect of the contrast between these images?
(p8-9) de Botton alleges that modern travel marketing and William Hodges’ artwork, more than 200 years earlier, draws on the same imagery and manipulates us in the same ways. What points does he make about each?
What is the tone of de Botton’s comments? How does his tone affect the representation of people and landscapes? What do you glean of his attitude to travel? What do you glean of his attitude towards human susceptibility?
de Botton quickly equates the desire to travel with the human desire to be happy. Do you agree with this assumption? Why or why not? Look at his comments under Point 2. on p9
Read de Botton’s synopsis of J.-K. Huysman’s A Rebours at Point 3. on p9-11. How does this summary represent the relationships between people and landscapes, real or imagined? Be specific about language forms and features.
At Point 4. (p12) de Botton describes some of the experiences that resonate with the fictional Duc des Esseintes’ attitude to travel. How does he draw attention to the elements that stand in the way of a positive travel experience? Make close reference to language forms and features.
“Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.” (p25) What does this suggest about the art of travel? What are the implications for the relationship between people and landscapes?
Sample Topic Sentences:
Physical movement is not always required for one to access the benefits of travel.
Holidays lead to happiness provided the traveller is happy before the holiday begins.
Anticipation of travel can be just as powerful as travel itself.
“We may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there.” (p23)
“The imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience.” (p27)
On Travelling Places
Charles Baudelaire
What is the effect of the selection and inclusion of snippets of Baudelaire’s poetry?
How does the inclusion of the images on p42-43, p44 and p46-47 enhance your reading of the poem Baudelaire’s The Outsider?
In this section, de Botton describes a range of “unexpectedly poetic travelling places – airport terminals, harbours, train stations and motels” along with service stations, trains, ships – “the transient places of travel…” What power does he attribute to these travelling places? How is this power created? What words, phrases and images does he use to invoke the power and pleasure of these places?
Edward Hopper
In a study of the paintings of Edward Hopper, focused on Baudelaire’s travelling places, de Botton explores the loneliness of travel and the unexpected instances of community – “In roadside diners and late-night cafeterias, hotel lobbies and station cafes, we may dilute a feeling of isolation in a lonely public place and hence rediscover a distinctive sense of community.” Look at the four paintings de Botton has selected for inclusion. Look them up online so that you can see the colour and detail of these paintings. Choose the one you think best represents the relationship between people and landscapes. Drawing on de Botton’s comments and your own observation of your chosen painting, complete a detailed analysis of the painting with close reference to the forms and features of a visual text.
At Point 7. de Botton explores the opportunity for introspective reflection afforded by the actual process of travel – time on trains especially. He elevates these transient travelling places to the level of the holiday destinations themselves in their ability to refresh and renew. How persuasive do you find his musings here? What words or phrases work to convince you that there may be virtue in the simple, passive experience of being moved from one place to another?
Sample Topic Sentences:
“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.” Charles Baudelaire (p34)
“There is psychological pleasure in this take-off too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives; to imagine that we too might surge above much that now looms over us.” (p41)
There is community for the lonely traveller in an accidental gathering of solitary strangers.
“In this last stop before the road enters the endless forest, it is what we have in common with others that looms larger than what separates us.” (p56)
Time spent in transit is like time suspended from the ins and outs of everyday life.
A fluidly moving landscape facilitates the fluid movement of the mind.
“Journeys are the midwives of thought.” (p57)
“It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves.” (p59)
“… these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.” (p60)
MOTIVES
On the Exotic
Gustave Flaubert
What do you feel constitutes the exotic?
Point 1. (p69-70) is an unpacking of the term “exotic”. de Botton concludes that it is a relative rather than an absolute concept. How does de Botton seek to convince his reader of this? How does he break down the relationship between the individual and the exotic?
How does he link this now somewhat simplified notion of the exotic to happiness/delight/pleasure?
How does his introduction to Gustave Flaubert (p71-75) further this link de Botton makes between the exotic and the human quest for happiness?
de Botton parallels Flaubert’s delight in the foreign values of Egypt with his own delight in Amsterdam “not only because they are new, but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland could provide. My enthusiasms in Amsterdam were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country… What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.” (p78) Read the extract from Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas (p79-82) and compare it to his experiences in Egypt under Point 5. (p82-89) For Flaubert, what is the collision between the values of home in France and the foreign values of Egypt? What does he reject about home and what does he embrace about Egypt? How does this contrast represent the relationship between people and landscapes? Refer closely to the language forms and features of de Botton’s account of this collision.
“We have all, without choosing, been scattered at birth by the wind on to a country, but, like Flaubert, we are in adulthood granted the freedom imaginatively to re-create our identity in line with our true allegiances.” (p100) The remainder of this chapter explores the way that Flaubert’s experiences in Egypt were both aided and hindered by his own imagination, and the way that he reimagined himself after his time there. How important is the role of imagination in travel? What evidence do you find in this section to support your answer?
Sample Topic Sentences:
The experience of the exotic is finding something that resonates with one’s sense of how life is, or should be, in the midst of an otherwise unfamiliar environment.
The gap between the imagined landscape and the real landscape reveals more about the traveller than the landscape itself.
“We may value foreign elements not only because they are new, but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland could provide.” (p78)
“What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.” (p78)
“Oh, necessity! To do what you are supposed to do; to be always, according to the circumstances (and despite the aversion of the moment), what a young man, or a tourist, or an artist, or a son, or a citizen, etc. is supposed to be!” Gustave Flaubert (p96)
“My native country is for me the country that I love, that is, the one that makes me dream, that makes me feel well.” Gustave Flaubert (p99)
“We have all, without choosing, been scattered at birth by the wind on to a country, but, like Flaubert, we are in adulthood granted the freedom imaginatively to re-create our identity in line with our true allegiances.” (p100)
On Curiosity
Alexander von Humboldt
What big questions do you have about the world? If you had limitless resources, what would you travel around the world in search of?
Section IV On Curiosity contrasts de Botton’s experience in Madrid with Alexander von Humboldt’s 1799 travels in South America. “It was a sunny day and crowds of tourists were stopping to take photographs and listen to guides. And I wondered, with mounting anxiety, what I was to do here, what I was to think. (4.) Humboldt had not been pursued by such questions. Everywhere he went, his mission was unambiguous: to discover facts and to carry out experiments toward that end… (5.) But in Madrid everything was already known, everything had already been measured.” (p108-109)
How does de Botton represent guide books in this section? (p103-125) Catalogue all of the language features he uses to create this representation and comment on their effect.
Additional Texts:
Novel/Film: You may or may not be familiar with E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View or the film of the same name (starring Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith, Daniel Day Lewis, Simon Callow, Judi Dench, Rupert Graves and Denholm Elliot). In this novel, a young girl travelling in Florence with a chaperone, finds herself wandering the city alone without her Baedeker travel guide (p40). She is unsure how to appreciate what she sees without the wisdom of the guide to inform her. Read the attached extract from the novel. How does this extract support de Botton’s comments about travel guides? If you are familiar with the rest of A Room with a View, contrast Lucy Honeychurch’s original reliance on her Baedeker with the Emersons’ attitude to life and travel. (The murder scene p61-66)
Sample Topic Sentences:
The very text intended and expected to create curiosity and intrigue in the traveller is the same text that renders curiosity useless and kills intrigue stone dead.
Travel should be approached as quest rather than a scavenger hunt.
“This tourist would learn to seek in other cultures ‘that which in the past was able to expand the concept “man” and make it more beautiful.’ Friedrich Nietzsche (p112)
“Unfortunately for the traveller, most objects don’t come affixed with the question that will generate the excitement they deserve.” (p122)
On Anticipation
J.-K. Huysman
Have you ever been somewhere beautiful or exciting but still felt unhappy? Describe your experience.
Note how de Botton evokes a desire for travel on p5-8 “By December… tinged orange by the city’s street-lights” with William Hodges Tahiti Revisited, 1776 printed on a double spread in the middle. What negative images does he create? How? What positive images does he create? How? What is the effect of the contrast between these images?
(p8-9) de Botton alleges that modern travel marketing and William Hodges’ artwork, more than 200 years earlier, draws on the same imagery and manipulates us in the same ways. What points does he make about each?
What is the tone of de Botton’s comments? How does his tone affect the representation of people and landscapes? What do you glean of his attitude to travel? What do you glean of his attitude towards human susceptibility?
de Botton quickly equates the desire to travel with the human desire to be happy. Do you agree with this assumption? Why or why not? Look at his comments under Point 2. on p9
Read de Botton’s synopsis of J.-K. Huysman’s A Rebours at Point 3. on p9-11. How does this summary represent the relationships between people and landscapes, real or imagined? Be specific about language forms and features.
At Point 4. (p12) de Botton describes some of the experiences that resonate with the fictional Duc des Esseintes’ attitude to travel. How does he draw attention to the elements that stand in the way of a positive travel experience? Make close reference to language forms and features.
“Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.” (p25) What does this suggest about the art of travel? What are the implications for the relationship between people and landscapes?
Sample Topic Sentences:
Physical movement is not always required for one to access the benefits of travel.
Holidays lead to happiness provided the traveller is happy before the holiday begins.
Anticipation of travel can be just as powerful as travel itself.
“We may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there.” (p23)
“The imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience.” (p27)
On Travelling Places
Charles Baudelaire
What is the effect of the selection and inclusion of snippets of Baudelaire’s poetry?
How does the inclusion of the images on p42-43, p44 and p46-47 enhance your reading of the poem Baudelaire’s The Outsider?
In this section, de Botton describes a range of “unexpectedly poetic travelling places – airport terminals, harbours, train stations and motels” along with service stations, trains, ships – “the transient places of travel…” What power does he attribute to these travelling places? How is this power created? What words, phrases and images does he use to invoke the power and pleasure of these places?
Edward Hopper
In a study of the paintings of Edward Hopper, focused on Baudelaire’s travelling places, de Botton explores the loneliness of travel and the unexpected instances of community – “In roadside diners and late-night cafeterias, hotel lobbies and station cafes, we may dilute a feeling of isolation in a lonely public place and hence rediscover a distinctive sense of community.” Look at the four paintings de Botton has selected for inclusion. Look them up online so that you can see the colour and detail of these paintings. Choose the one you think best represents the relationship between people and landscapes. Drawing on de Botton’s comments and your own observation of your chosen painting, complete a detailed analysis of the painting with close reference to the forms and features of a visual text.
At Point 7. de Botton explores the opportunity for introspective reflection afforded by the actual process of travel – time on trains especially. He elevates these transient travelling places to the level of the holiday destinations themselves in their ability to refresh and renew. How persuasive do you find his musings here? What words or phrases work to convince you that there may be virtue in the simple, passive experience of being moved from one place to another?
Sample Topic Sentences:
“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.” Charles Baudelaire (p34)
“There is psychological pleasure in this take-off too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives; to imagine that we too might surge above much that now looms over us.” (p41)
There is community for the lonely traveller in an accidental gathering of solitary strangers.
“In this last stop before the road enters the endless forest, it is what we have in common with others that looms larger than what separates us.” (p56)
Time spent in transit is like time suspended from the ins and outs of everyday life.
A fluidly moving landscape facilitates the fluid movement of the mind.
“Journeys are the midwives of thought.” (p57)
“It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves.” (p59)
“… these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.” (p60)
MOTIVES
On the Exotic
Gustave Flaubert
What do you feel constitutes the exotic?
Point 1. (p69-70) is an unpacking of the term “exotic”. de Botton concludes that it is a relative rather than an absolute concept. How does de Botton seek to convince his reader of this? How does he break down the relationship between the individual and the exotic?
How does he link this now somewhat simplified notion of the exotic to happiness/delight/pleasure?
How does his introduction to Gustave Flaubert (p71-75) further this link de Botton makes between the exotic and the human quest for happiness?
de Botton parallels Flaubert’s delight in the foreign values of Egypt with his own delight in Amsterdam “not only because they are new, but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland could provide. My enthusiasms in Amsterdam were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country… What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.” (p78) Read the extract from Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas (p79-82) and compare it to his experiences in Egypt under Point 5. (p82-89) For Flaubert, what is the collision between the values of home in France and the foreign values of Egypt? What does he reject about home and what does he embrace about Egypt? How does this contrast represent the relationship between people and landscapes? Refer closely to the language forms and features of de Botton’s account of this collision.
“We have all, without choosing, been scattered at birth by the wind on to a country, but, like Flaubert, we are in adulthood granted the freedom imaginatively to re-create our identity in line with our true allegiances.” (p100) The remainder of this chapter explores the way that Flaubert’s experiences in Egypt were both aided and hindered by his own imagination, and the way that he reimagined himself after his time there. How important is the role of imagination in travel? What evidence do you find in this section to support your answer?
Sample Topic Sentences:
The experience of the exotic is finding something that resonates with one’s sense of how life is, or should be, in the midst of an otherwise unfamiliar environment.
The gap between the imagined landscape and the real landscape reveals more about the traveller than the landscape itself.
“We may value foreign elements not only because they are new, but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland could provide.” (p78)
“What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.” (p78)
“Oh, necessity! To do what you are supposed to do; to be always, according to the circumstances (and despite the aversion of the moment), what a young man, or a tourist, or an artist, or a son, or a citizen, etc. is supposed to be!” Gustave Flaubert (p96)
“My native country is for me the country that I love, that is, the one that makes me dream, that makes me feel well.” Gustave Flaubert (p99)
“We have all, without choosing, been scattered at birth by the wind on to a country, but, like Flaubert, we are in adulthood granted the freedom imaginatively to re-create our identity in line with our true allegiances.” (p100)
On Curiosity
Alexander von Humboldt
What big questions do you have about the world? If you had limitless resources, what would you travel around the world in search of?
Section IV On Curiosity contrasts de Botton’s experience in Madrid with Alexander von Humboldt’s 1799 travels in South America. “It was a sunny day and crowds of tourists were stopping to take photographs and listen to guides. And I wondered, with mounting anxiety, what I was to do here, what I was to think. (4.) Humboldt had not been pursued by such questions. Everywhere he went, his mission was unambiguous: to discover facts and to carry out experiments toward that end… (5.) But in Madrid everything was already known, everything had already been measured.” (p108-109)
How does de Botton represent guide books in this section? (p103-125) Catalogue all of the language features he uses to create this representation and comment on their effect.
Additional Texts:
Novel/Film: You may or may not be familiar with E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View or the film of the same name (starring Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith, Daniel Day Lewis, Simon Callow, Judi Dench, Rupert Graves and Denholm Elliot). In this novel, a young girl travelling in Florence with a chaperone, finds herself wandering the city alone without her Baedeker travel guide (p40). She is unsure how to appreciate what she sees without the wisdom of the guide to inform her. Read the attached extract from the novel. How does this extract support de Botton’s comments about travel guides? If you are familiar with the rest of A Room with a View, contrast Lucy Honeychurch’s original reliance on her Baedeker with the Emersons’ attitude to life and travel. (The murder scene p61-66)
Sample Topic Sentences:
The very text intended and expected to create curiosity and intrigue in the traveller is the same text that renders curiosity useless and kills intrigue stone dead.
Travel should be approached as quest rather than a scavenger hunt.
“This tourist would learn to seek in other cultures ‘that which in the past was able to expand the concept “man” and make it more beautiful.’ Friedrich Nietzsche (p112)
“Unfortunately for the traveller, most objects don’t come affixed with the question that will generate the excitement they deserve.” (p122)