The Art of Travel

by Alain De Botton

  In 1906, at the age of twenty-four, Hopper went to Paris, where he discovered the poetry of Baudelaire. He was to read and recite the Frenchman's work throughout his life. The attraction is not hard to understand: the two men had shared interests in solitude, in city life, in modernity, in the solace of the night and in the places of travel. In 1925, Hopper bought his first car, a secondhand Dodge, and drove from his home in New York to New Mexico; from that point on he spent several months on the road every year, sketching and painting along the way, in motel rooms, in the backs of cars, outdoors and in diners. Between 1941 and 1955, he crossed America five times. He stayed in Best Western motels, Del Haven cabins, Alamo Plaza courts and Blue Top lodges. He was drawn to the sorts of places whose neon signs blink ‘Vacancy TV, Bath' from the side of the road, offering beds with thin mattresses and crisp sheets, large windows overlooking car parks or small patches of manicured lawn, the mystery of guests who arrive late and set off at dawn, brochures for local attractions in the reception area and laden housekeeping trolleys parked in silent corridors. For meals Hopper would stop at diners, at Hot Shoppes Mighty Mo Drive-ins, Steak ‘N' Shakes or Dog ‘N' Suds, and he would fill up his car at petrol stations displaying the logos of Mobil, Standard Oil, Gulf and Blue Sunoco.

  And in these ignored, often derided landscapes, Hopper found poetry: the poésie des motels, the poésie des petits restaurants au bord d'une route. His paintings (and their resonant titles) suggest a consistent interest in five different kinds of travelling places:

  1. HOTELS

  Hotel Room (1931)

  Hotel Lobby (1943)

  Rooms for Tourists (1945)

  Hotel by a Railroad (1952)

  Hotel Window (1956)

  Western Motel (1957)

  2. ROADS AND PETROL STATIONS

  Road in Maine (1914)

  Gas (1940)

  Route 6, Eastham (1941)

  Solitude (1944)

  Four-Lane Road (1956)

  3. DINERS AND CAFETERIAS

  Automat‘(1927)

  Sunlight in a Cafeteria (1958)

  4. VIEWS FROM TRAINS

  House by the Railroad (1925)

  New York, New Haven and Hat-ford‘(1931)

  Railroad Embankment (1932)

  Toward Boston (1936)

  Approaching a City (1946)

  Road and Trees (1962)

  5. VIEWS INSIDE TRAINS AND OF ROLLING STOCK

  Night on the El Train (1920)

  Locomotive (1925)

  Compartment C, Car 293 (1938)

  Daivn in Pennsylvania (1942)

  Chair Car (1965)

  Loneliness is the dominant theme here. Hopper's figures seem far from home; they sit or stand alone, looking at a letter on the edge of a hotel bed or drinking in a bar, gazing out the window of a moving train or reading a book in a hotel lobby. Their faces are vulnerable and introspective. Having perhaps just left someone or been left themselves, they are in search of work, sex or company, adrift in transient places. It is often night, and through the window come the darkness and threat of the open country or of a strange city.

  In Automat (1927), a woman sits alone drinking a cup of coffee. It is late and, to judge by her hat and coat, cold outside. The room seems large, brightly lit and empty. The decor is functional, with a stone-topped table, hard-wearing black wooden chairs and white walls. The woman looks self-conscious and slightly afraid, unused to sitting alone in a public place. Something appears to have gone wrong. She unwittingly invites the viewer to imagine stories for her, stories of betrayal or loss. She is trying not to let her hand shake as she moves the coffee cup to her lips. It may be eleven at night in February in a large North American city.

  Automatic a picture of sadness, and yet it is not a sad picture. It has

  Edward Hopper, Automat, 1927

  the power of a great melancholy piece of music. Despite the stark-ness of the furnishings, the location itself does not seem wretched. Others in the room may be on their own as well, men and women drinking coffee by themselves, similarly lost in thought, similarly distanced from society: a common isolation that generally has the beneficial effect of lessening the oppressive sense within any one person that he or she is alone in being alone. In roadside diners and late-night cafeterias, hotel lobbies and station cafes, we may dilute our feeling of isolation in a lonely public place and hence rediscover a distinctive sense of community. The lack of domesticity, the bright lights and anonymous furniture may come as a relief from what are often the false comforts of home. It may be easier to give way to sadness here than in a living room with wallpaper and framed photos, the decor of a refuge that has let us down.

  Hopper invites us to feel empathy with the woman in her isolation. She seems dignified and generous, only perhaps a little too trusting, a little naive—as if she has knocked against a hard corner of the world. Hopper puts us on her side, the side of the outsider against the insiders. The figures in Hopper's art are not opponents of home per se; it is simply that in a variety of undefined ways, home appears to have betrayed them, forcing them out into the night or onto the road. The twenty-four-hour diner, the station waiting room and the motel are sanctuaries for those who have, for noble reasons, failed to find a home in the ordinary world—those whom Baudelaire might have dignified with the honorific poets.

  6.

  As the car slips along a winding road through the woods at dusk, its powerful headlamps momentarily light up whole sections of meadow and tree trunks—so brightly that the texture of the bark and individual stalks of grass can be made out in a clinical white light better suited to a hospital ward than to woodland—and then dip them back into the undifferentiated murkiness as the car rounds the corner and the beams turn their attention to another patch of slumbering ground.

  There are few other cars on the road, only an occasional set of lights moving in the opposite direction, away from the night. The car's instrument panel casts a purple glow over the darkened interior. Suddenly, in a clearing ahead, a floodlit expanse appears: a petrol station, the last before the road heads off into the longest, densest stretch of forest, and night completes its hold over the land—Gas (1940).

  The manager has left his cabin to check the level on a pump. It is warm inside, and light as brilliant as that given off by the midday sun washes across the forecourt. A radio may be playing. There may be cans of oil neatly lined up against one wall, along with sweets, magazines, maps and window cloths.

  Like Automat, painted thirteen years before it, Gas is a picture of isolation: a petrol station stands on its own in the impending darkness. But in Hopper's hands, the isolation is once again made poignant and enticing. The darkness that spreads like a fog from the right of the canvas, a harbinger of fear, contrasts with the security of the station itself. Against the backdrop of night and wild woods, in this last outpost of humanity, a sense of kinship may be easier to develop than in daylight in the city. The coffee machine and magazines, tokens of small human desires and vanities, stand in opposition to the wide nonhuman world outside, to the miles of forest in which branches crack now and then under the footfalls of bears and foxes. There is something touching in the suggestion—made in bold pink on the cover of one magazine—that we paint our nails purple

  Edward Hopper, Gas, 1940

  this summer, and in the imprecation above the coffee machine to sample the aroma of freshly roasted beans. At this last stop before the road enters the endless forest, what we have in common with others can loom larger than what separates us.

  7.

  Hopper also took an interest in trains. He was drawn to the atmosphere inside half-empty carriages making their way across a landscape: the silence that reigns inside while the wheels beat in rhythm against the rails outside, the dreaminess fostered by the noise and the view from the windows—a dreaminess in which we seem to stand outside our normal selves and to have access to thoughts and memories that may not arise in more settled circumstances. The woman in Compartment C, Car 2�
�j (1938) seems in such a frame of mind, reading her book and shifting her gaze between the carriage and the view.

  Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is before our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, and new thoughts, new places. Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand. Thinking improves when parts of the mind are given other tasks—charged with listening to music, for example, or following a line of trees. The music or the view distracts for a time that nervous, censorious, practical part of the mind which is inclined to shut down when it notices something difficult emerging in consciousness,

  Edward Hopper, Compartment C, Car 2ßj, 1938

  and which runs scared of memories, longings and introspective or original ideas, preferring instead the administrative and the impersonal.

  Of all modes of transport, the train is perhaps the best aid to thought. The views have none of the potential monotony of those on a ship or a plane, moving quickly enough for us not to get exasperated but slowly enough to allow us to identify objects. They offer us brief, inspiring glimpses into private domains, letting us see a woman at the precise moment when she takes a cup from a shelf in her kitchen, then carrying us on to a patio where a man is sleeping and then to a park where a child is catching a ball thrown by a figure we cannot see.

  On a journey across flat country, I think with a rare lack of inhibition about the death of my father, about an essay I am writing on Stendhal and about a mistrust that has arisen between two friends. Every time my mind goes blank, having hit on a difficult idea, the flow of consciousness is assisted by the possibility of looking out the window, locking on to object and following it for a few seconds, until a new coil of thought is ready to form and can unravel without pressure.

  At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves—that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.

  Hotel rooms offer us a similar opportunity to escape our habits of mind. Lying in bed in a hotel, the room quiet except for the occasional swooshing of an elevator in the innards of the building, we can draw a line under what preceded our arrival; we can overfly great and ignored stretches of our experience and reflect upon our lives from a height we could not have reached in the midst of our everyday business. We may be subtly assisted in this endeavour by the unfamiliar world around us—by the small wrapped soaps on the edge of the basin, by the gallery of miniature bottles in the minibar, by the room-service menu with its promises of all-night dining and by the view onto an unknown city stirring silently twenty-five floors below us.

  Hotel note pads can be the recipients of unexpectedly intense, revelatory thoughts, taken down in the early hours while the breakfast menu (‘to be hung outside before 3:00 A.M.') lies unattended on the floor, along with a card announcing the next day's weather and the management's best wishes for a peaceful night.

  8.

  The value we ascribe to the process of travelling, to wandering without reference to a destination, connects us, the critic Raymond Williams once suggested, to a broad shift in sensibilities dating back to some two hundred years ago, whereby the outsider came to seem morally superior to the insider:

  From the late eighteenth century onwards, it is no longer from the practice of community but from being a wanderer that the instinct of fellow-feeling is derived. Thus an essential isolation and silence and loneliness become the carriers of nature and community against the rigours, the cold abstinence, the selfish ease of ordinary society.

  Raymond Williams, The Country and the City

  If we find poetry in the service station and the motel, if we are drawn to the airport or the train carriage, it is perhaps because, despite their architectural compromises and discomforts, despite their garish colours and harsh lighting, we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.

  Edward Hopper, Hotel Room, 1931

  MOTIVES

  III

  On the Exotic

  1.

  On disembarking at Amsterdam's Schipol Airport, I am struck, only a few steps inside the terminal, by the appearance of a sign hanging from the ceiling, which announces the way to the arrivals hall, the exit and the transfer desks. It is a bright-yellow sign, one metre high and two metres across, simple in design, a plastic fascia in an illuminated aluminium box suspended on steel struts from a ceiling webbed with cables and air-conditioning ducts. Despite its simplicity, even its mundanity the sign delights me, a delight for which the adjective exotic, though unusual, seems apt. The exoticism is located in particular areas: in the double a of Aankomst, in the neighbourliness of the u and the i in Uitgang, in the use of English subtitles, in the word for ‘desk', balies, and in the choice of practical, modernist fonts, Frutiger or Univers.

  If the sign provokes in me genuine pleasure, it is in part because it offers the first conclusive evidence of my having arrived elsewhere. It is a symbol of being abroad. Although it may not seem distinctive to the casual eye, such a sign would never exist in precisely this form in my own country. There it would be less yellow, the typeface would be softer and more nostalgic, there would—out of greater indifference to the confusion of foreigners—be no subtitles, and the language would contain no double as, a repetition in which I sense, confusedly, the presence of another history and mind-set.

  A plug socket, a bathroom tap, a jam jar or an airport sign may tell us more than its designer intended; it may speak of the nation that made it. And the nation that made the sign at Schipol Airport seems very far from my own. A bold archaeologist of national character might trace the influence of the lettering back to the de Stijl movement of the early twentieth century, the prominence of the English

  subtitles to the Dutch openness towards foreign influences and the foundation of the East India Company in 1602, and the overall simplicity of the sign to the Calvinist aesthetic that became a part of Holland's identity during the war between the United Provinces and Spain in the sixteenth century.

  That a sign could evolve so differently in two places is evidence of a simple but pleasing idea: countries are diverse, and practices variable across borders. Yet difference alone would not be enough to elicit pleasure, or not for long. The difference has to seem like an improvement on what my own country is capable of. If I call the Schipol sign exotic, it is because it succeeds in suggesting, vaguely but intensely, that the country that made it and that lies beyond the uitgang may in critical ways prove more congenial than my own to my temperament and concerns. The sign is a promise of happiness.

  2.

  The word exotic has traditionally been attached to more colourful things than Dutch signs, among them snake charmers, harems, minarets, camels, souks and mint tea poured from a great height into a tray of small glasses by a moustachioed servant.

  In the first half of the nineteenth century, the term became synonymous with the Middle East. When Victor Hugo published his cycle of poems Les Orientales in 1829, he could declare in the preface, ‘We are all much more concerned with the Orient than ever before. The Orient has become a subject of general preoccupation, to which the author of this book has deferred.'

  Hugo's poems featured the staples of European Orientalist literature: pirates, pashas, sultans, spices, moustaches and dervishes. Characters drank mint tea from small glasse
s. His work found an eager audience, as did the Arabian Nights, the Oriental novels of Walter Scott and Byron's The Giaour. In January 1832, Eugene Delacroix set off for North Africa to capture the exoticism of the Orient in painting. Within three months of arriving in Tangier, he was wearing local dress and signing himself off in letters to his brother as ‘your African'.

  Even European public places were becoming more Oriental in appearance. On the fourteenth of September 1833, a crowd lined the banks of the Seine near Rouen and cheered as a French Navy boat christened the Louxor sailed upstream to Paris on its way from Alexandria, bearing, in a specially constructed hold, the giant obelisk lifted from the temple complex at Thebes, destined for a traffic island on the Place de la Concorde.

  One of the spectators was a moody twelve-year-old boy named Gustave Flaubert, whose greatest wish was to leave Rouen, become a camel driver in Egypt and lose his virginity in a harem, to an olive-skinned woman with a trace of down on her upper lip.

  The youngster held Rouen—indeed, the whole of France—in profound contempt. As he put it to his school friend Ernest Chevalier, he felt nothing but disdain for this ‘good civilisation' that prided itself on having produced ‘railways, poisons, cream tarts, royalty and the guillotine'. His life was ‘sterile, banal and laborious'. ‘Often I feel like blowing the heads off passersby' he told his diary. ‘I am bored, I am bored, I am bored.' He returned repeatedly to the theme of how boring it was to live in France, and especially in Rouen. ‘Today my boredom was terrible,' he reported at the end of one bad Sunday. ‘How beautiful are the provinces and how chic are the comfortably off who live there! Their talk is… of taxes and road improvements. The neighbour is a wonderful institution. To be given