Alain de Botton – The Art Of Travel

Lecture date: 2003-01-23

Alain de Botton, author of The Art of Travel, addresses such topics as airports, exotic carpets, holiday romance and hotel minibars, while referencing the beauty of spaces and architecture and suggesting how we can learn to be happier on our journeys.

Mohsen Mostafavi introduces Alain de Botton.

It’s a great pleasure to welcome Alain De Botton to the AA. Alain’s talk tonight is in conjunction with and exhibition that we have upstairs and the exhibition relates to a travel scholarship that exists under the name of Peter Sabara. Peter Sabara was a wonderful student here many years ago he died when he was very young and he used to teach here and at Royal Collage and his family then set up this travel fellowship which is given every year between the students of the AA and the students of the RCA.  And this year the winners have been Jonathan Nicos and Joseph Prima [inaudible], two students in the diploma school at the AA. Normally when we have the Peter Sabara travel fellowships people submit proposals that are very, very complex, very detailed. For example the last one was a fantastic kind of exploration along the silk route. And the idea of actual route became such a critical part of it Jonathan and Joseph went completely the opposite way by trying not to have a very clear destination and letting themselves be open to the possibility of discovering places so the photographs upstairs document this. I think if you haven’t seen them I would really urge you to have a look at them because they’re great. And after seeing the photographs and the proposal I think it dawned to Vanessa Norwood, who coordinates exhibitions here, that in fact Alain was the person who had also written very eloquently on this topic and in fact Joseph and Jonathan were not the first people to come up with the idea of not having a destination.  But I think that then set up this ability of this conversation between their photographs and Alains work on travel. Alain de Botton has been really one of the most influential figures in contemporary literature especially in the last 5-10 years where The Consolations of Philosophy which has probably played a very significant role in bringing philosophy to a much wider audience than it has been historically. And of course his more recent The Art of Travel has received enormous attention he has recently finished a book entitle Status Anxiety which is on social hierarchy in the west and is working on a book on interiors which I think would be of great relevance to a lot of us, so without further delay please welcome Alain De Botton.

[Inaudible] I much enjoyed looking at the exhibition upstairs if any of you haven’t seen it it really is well worth seeing almost uncanny in the way that it’s picked up on things that I was interested in already so it just shows that where all roughly thinking the same things. Tonight I want to talk about travel but I wrote this book called the Art of travel but really it’s not about travel because travel doesn’t really interest me what interests me is places and when I was writing this book, I always thought to myself my secret ideology was that this really was a book just about places and their power and their effect on us and the word travel was simply a good hold-all in which to contain all of these ideas, that I didn’t really know where they belonged and then just though of sticking the word travel on the jacket which got me into a lot of trouble with certain reviewers who kept saying where’s the bit about your year off when you go travelling and where’s the bit about losing your luggage etc , it really it’s a very selective journey through travel and the emphasis and I’m saying this to you because of where we are tonight is really on places and power of places and the emotions that we can have in certain places and it did seem to me when writing this book that this is sort of an area of life which doesn’t really quite have a genre it’s a little bit travel it could be architecture or landscape writing I don’t know what it is so a weird book.  And The art of Travel was designed really to be a chance really for me to think about that and pin down some of my thoughts I should probably say that before writing this book a few years ago I wrote a book called how Proust can change your life although when the book was originally written it was called how Proust will change your life. And then I remember sending the book to my American editor and he read it and then a few days later he said we will publish the book but we do insist that you change the title because our in house lawyer has read the book and in certain American states you can be sued if you make a promise that isn’t then fulfilled so better change it to how Proust can change your life. I’m saying this just in case what I’m goin