Tuesday, July 30, 2002
I'll try to refrain from posting long articles in here, but I'd like to keep some of these quotes somewhere permanent. This piece is from PW Daily for July 30, 2002:
The Art of Traveling with Books by Alain de Botton (Part 1)
Philosopher and author Alain de Botton's just published The Art of Travel (Pantheon, $23) looks at the role of travel in our lives--how
it fulfills and thwarts our desires, and simultaneously stimulates our
curiosity and makes us long for home.
The well-traveled author, about to tour the United States in support
of the title, contributed these thoughts to PW Daily on what one takes
along to read when embarking on a book tour, and the art of traveling
with books in general.
(This is the first in a series of occasional pieces by authors about
what they're reading on tour.)
Because writers are only really happy when they're at work at their
desks, one of the compensations of going on a book tour lies in the
idea that at least one will at last have time to catch up on a lot of
reading After all, there are all those long flights, train journeys
and evenings in lonely hotel rooms to fill. No wonder most writers,
this one included, leave home weighed down with books.
Unfortunately, there's a problem, and it's to Aldous Huxley that we
must turn for its finest articulation--in the context of reading on
tours of a different sort, this time the purely touristic kind. 'All
tourists cherish an illusion,' wrote Huxley in an essay published in
1925 called 'Books for the Journey,' 'they imagine that they will find
time, in the course of their travels, to do a lot of reading. They see
themselves, at the end of a day's sightseeing or motoring, studiously
turning over the pages of all the vast and serious works which, at
ordinary seasons, they never find time to read. They start for a
fortnight's tour in France, taking with them The Critique of Pure
Reason, Appearance and Reality, the complete works of Dante and the
Golden Bough. They come home to make the discovery that they have read
something less than half a chapter of the Golden Bough and the first
fifty-two lines of the Inferno.'
Ever since the invention of the printing press, those who most love
books have been prey to an awkward, paradoxical thought; that there
are far too many books in the world. In secret moments, these book
lovers may even look back with nostalgia to that fortunate
scroll-and-scribe era when, a little after middle age, educated people
with good libraries and not too many pressing engagements could
conceivably reach a point when they had read everything.
If we lament our book-swamped age, it may be out of an awareness that
it is not by reading more books, but by deepening our understanding of
a few well-chosen ones that we develop our intelligence and our
sensitivity. And yet this patient focus on a few titles is made ever
harder by the abundance of new books, and by the deliberate attempts
of publishers to make us feel badly read, to frustrate our wish to
deepen our loyalties to a few works. The modern book lover is
condemned to a nauseous feeling of under-read-ness, and a visit of a
library or large bookstore may provoke as much despair as
exhilaration.
Perhaps the key to fruitful book tour reading is to accept with good
grace that we will never be able to read everything, and therefore we
must stop packing our suitcases full of Tolstoy and Joyce when we're
booked in for a week around the Midwest. Huxley came up with a
brilliant suggestion to counteract the pressures to read everything:
we must read only maxims on our travels. As Huxley put it, 'Maxims
take only a minute to read, but can provide matter upon which thought
can ruminate for hours.' Here is a nice maxim from Marcel Proust that
might, Huxley suggests, last you between London and Paris: 'There is
no doubt that a person's charms are less frequently a cause of love
than a remark such as: No, this evening I shan't be free. ' Here is
one from Friedrich Nietzsche: 'There will be few who, when they are in
want of matter for conversation, do not reveal the more secret affairs
of their friends.' Enough to get one around the East Coast.
There can be a perverse pleasure in reading against the grain of
places where one is traveling on tour; in reading plainly
'inappropriate books,' for example, Das Capital in Las Vegas or The
Virgin in the Garden and A Prayer for Owen Meany in Florida. Through
such choices, we express a small revolt against the place we are
traveling through, we hold on to sides of ourselves which our new
environment seems unsympathetic to--like reading Emerson at the
hairdresser.
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The Art of Traveling with Books by Alain de Botton (Part 1)
Philosopher and author Alain de Botton's just published The Art of Travel (Pantheon, $23) looks at the role of travel in our lives--how
it fulfills and thwarts our desires, and simultaneously stimulates our
curiosity and makes us long for home.
The well-traveled author, about to tour the United States in support
of the title, contributed these thoughts to PW Daily on what one takes
along to read when embarking on a book tour, and the art of traveling
with books in general.
(This is the first in a series of occasional pieces by authors about
what they're reading on tour.)
Because writers are only really happy when they're at work at their
desks, one of the compensations of going on a book tour lies in the
idea that at least one will at last have time to catch up on a lot of
reading After all, there are all those long flights, train journeys
and evenings in lonely hotel rooms to fill. No wonder most writers,
this one included, leave home weighed down with books.
Unfortunately, there's a problem, and it's to Aldous Huxley that we
must turn for its finest articulation--in the context of reading on
tours of a different sort, this time the purely touristic kind. 'All
tourists cherish an illusion,' wrote Huxley in an essay published in
1925 called 'Books for the Journey,' 'they imagine that they will find
time, in the course of their travels, to do a lot of reading. They see
themselves, at the end of a day's sightseeing or motoring, studiously
turning over the pages of all the vast and serious works which, at
ordinary seasons, they never find time to read. They start for a
fortnight's tour in France, taking with them The Critique of Pure
Reason, Appearance and Reality, the complete works of Dante and the
Golden Bough. They come home to make the discovery that they have read
something less than half a chapter of the Golden Bough and the first
fifty-two lines of the Inferno.'
Ever since the invention of the printing press, those who most love
books have been prey to an awkward, paradoxical thought; that there
are far too many books in the world. In secret moments, these book
lovers may even look back with nostalgia to that fortunate
scroll-and-scribe era when, a little after middle age, educated people
with good libraries and not too many pressing engagements could
conceivably reach a point when they had read everything.
If we lament our book-swamped age, it may be out of an awareness that
it is not by reading more books, but by deepening our understanding of
a few well-chosen ones that we develop our intelligence and our
sensitivity. And yet this patient focus on a few titles is made ever
harder by the abundance of new books, and by the deliberate attempts
of publishers to make us feel badly read, to frustrate our wish to
deepen our loyalties to a few works. The modern book lover is
condemned to a nauseous feeling of under-read-ness, and a visit of a
library or large bookstore may provoke as much despair as
exhilaration.
Perhaps the key to fruitful book tour reading is to accept with good
grace that we will never be able to read everything, and therefore we
must stop packing our suitcases full of Tolstoy and Joyce when we're
booked in for a week around the Midwest. Huxley came up with a
brilliant suggestion to counteract the pressures to read everything:
we must read only maxims on our travels. As Huxley put it, 'Maxims
take only a minute to read, but can provide matter upon which thought
can ruminate for hours.' Here is a nice maxim from Marcel Proust that
might, Huxley suggests, last you between London and Paris: 'There is
no doubt that a person's charms are less frequently a cause of love
than a remark such as: No, this evening I shan't be free. ' Here is
one from Friedrich Nietzsche: 'There will be few who, when they are in
want of matter for conversation, do not reveal the more secret affairs
of their friends.' Enough to get one around the East Coast.
There can be a perverse pleasure in reading against the grain of
places where one is traveling on tour; in reading plainly
'inappropriate books,' for example, Das Capital in Las Vegas or The
Virgin in the Garden and A Prayer for Owen Meany in Florida. Through
such choices, we express a small revolt against the place we are
traveling through, we hold on to sides of ourselves which our new
environment seems unsympathetic to--like reading Emerson at the
hairdresser.
