If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest—in all its ardour and paradoxes—than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside of the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems—that is, issues requiring thought beyond the practical. We are inundated with advice on whereto travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or ‘human flourishing’.
But as the moment to board his train approached, along with the chance to turn his dreams of London into reality, des Esseintes was abruptly overcome with lassitude. He thought how wearing it would be actually to make the journey—how he would have to run to the station, fight for a porter, board the train, endure an unfamiliar bed, stand in lines, feel cold and move his fragile frame around the sights that Baedeker had so tersely described—and thus soil his dreams: ‘What was the good of moving when a person could travel so wonderfully sitting in a chair? Wasn’t he already in London, whose smells, weather, citizens, food, and even cutlery were all about him? What could he expect to find over there except fresh disappointments?
And so he had journeyed to Haarlem and Amsterdam—and was greatly disappointed. The problem was not that the paintings themselves lied—the place did offer some simplicity and joviality, some nice brick courtyards and a few serving women pouring milk—but rather that the promised gems were blended in a stew of ordinary images (restaurants, offices, uniform houses and featureless fields) that the Dutch artists had never painted, and that made the experience of travelling in the country seem strangely diluted compared with an afternoon spent in the Dutch galleries of the Louvre, where the essence of Dutch beauty found itself collected in just a few rooms.
Des Esseintes thus ended up in the paradoxical position of feeling more in Holland—that is, more intensely in contact with the elements he loved in Dutch culture—when looking at selected images of Holland in a museum than when travelling with sixteen pieces of luggage and two servants through the country itself.
At midmorning on that first day, M. and I sat on deck chairs outside our beach hut. A single cloud hung shyly above the bay. M. put on her headphones and began annotating Emile Durkheim’s On Suicide. I looked around me. It would have seemed to observers that I was where I lay. But T—that is, the conscious part of my self—had in truth abandoned the physical envelope in which it dwelt in order to worry about the future, or more specifically about the issue of whether lunches would be included in the price of the room. Two hours later, seated at a corner table in the hotel restaurant with a papaya (lunch and local taxes included), the I that had left my body on the deck chair now made another migration, quitting the island altogether to visit a troubling project scheduled for the following year.
It was as if a vital evolutionary advantage had been bestowed centuries ago on those members of the species who lived in a state of concern about what was to happen next. These ancestors might have failed to savour their experiences appropriately, but they had at least survived and shaped the[…]
We saw stars
And waves; we saw sands, too; And despite many crises and unforeseen disasters,
We were often bored, just as we are here.
Noting, ‘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,’ he was nevertheless unashamed to count himself among the patients: ‘It always seems to me that I’ll be well where I am not, and this question of moving is one that I’m forever entertaining with my soul.’ Sometimes Baudelaire dreamt of going to Lisbon. It would be warm there, and he would, like a lizard, gain strength from stretching himself out in the sun. It was a city of water, marble and light, conducive to thought and calm. But almost from the moment he conceived this Portuguese fantasy, he would start to wonder if he might not be happier in Holland. Then again, why not Java or the Baltic or even the North Pole, where he could bathe in shadows and watch comets fly across the Arctic skies? The destination was not really the point. The true desire was to get away—to go, as he concluded, ‘anywhere! anywhere! so long as it is out of the world!
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 “or a time that nervous, censorious, practical part of the mind which is inclined to shut down when it notices something difficult emerging in consciousness, and which runs scared of memories, longings and introspective or original ideas, preferring instead the administrative and the impersonal.
When I consider… the small space I occupy, which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me [I’infinie immensité des espaces que I’ignore et qui m’ignorent], I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here?
He was categorical: sublimity had to do with a feeling of weakness. Many landscapes were beautiful—meadows in spring, soft valleys, oak trees, banks of flowers (daisies especially)—but they were not sublime. ‘The ideas of the sublime and beautiful are frequently confounded,’ he complained. ‘Both are indiscriminately applied to things greatly differing and sometimes of natures directly opposite’—a trace of irritation on the part of the young philosopher with those who might have gasped at the Thames from Kew and called that sublime. A landscape could arouse the sublime only when it suggested power—a power greater than that of humans, and threatening to them. Sublime places embodied a defiance to man’s will. Burke illustrated his argument with an analogy about oxen and bulls: An ox is a creature of vast strength; but he is an innocent creature, extremely serviceable, and not at all dangerous; for which reason the idea of an ox is by no means grand. A bull is strong too; but his strength is of another kind; often very destructive. … The idea of a bull is therefore great, and it has frequently a place in sublime descriptions, and elevating comparisons.
But why the pleasure? Why seek out this feeling of smallness—delight in it, even? Why leave the comforts of Eilat, join a group of desert devotees and walk for miles with a heavy pack along the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba, all to reach a place of rocks and silence where one must shelter from the sun like a fugitive in the scant shadow of giant boulders? Why contemplate with exhilaration rather than despair beds of granite and baking gravel pans and a frozen lava of mountains extending into the distance until the peaks dissolve at the edge of a hard blue sky?
One answer is that not everything that is more powerful than us must always be hateful to us. What defies our will can provoke anger and resentment, but it may also arouse awe and respect. It depends on whether the obstacle appears noble in its defiance or squalid and insolent. We begrudge the defiance of the cocky doorman even as we honour that of the mist-shrouded mountain. We are humiliated by what is powerful and mean but awed by what is powerful and noble. To return to and extend Burke’s animal analogy, a[…]
There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief without the help of any other argument
Asked to explain why Job has been made to suffer even though he has been good, God draws Job’s attention to the mighty phenomena of nature. Do not be surprised that things have not gone your way he declares: the universe is greater than you. Do not be surprised that you do not understand why they have not gone your way for you cannot fathom the logic of the universe. See how small you are next to the mountains. Accept what is bigger than you and what you do not understand. The world may appear illogical to you, but it does not follow that it is illogical per se. Our lives are not the measure of all things: consider sublime places for a reminder of human insignificance and frailty.
There is a strictly religious message here. God assures Job that he has a place in his heart, even if all events do not centre around him and may at times appear to run contrary to his interest. When divine wisdom eludes human understanding, the righteous, made aware of their limitations by the spectacle of sublime nature, must continue to trust in God’s plans for the universe.
Yet in playing hell, van Gogh was only making more explicit a process in which all artists are involved—namely, choosing which aspects of reality to include in a work and which to leave out. As Nietzsche knew, reality itself is infinite and can never be wholly represented in art. What made van Gogh unusual among Proverai artists was his choice of what he felt was important. Whereas painters such as Constantin had expended much effort in getting the scale right, van Gogh, though passionately interested in producing a ‘likeness’, insisted that it was not by worrying about scale that “he would end up conveying what was important in the South: his art would involve, as he mockingly told his brother, ‘a likeness different from the products of the God-fearing photographer’. The part of reality that concerned him sometimes required distortion, omission and the substitution of colours to be brought to the fore, but it was still the real—the ‘likeness’—that interested him. He was willing to sacrifice a naive realism in order to achieve realism of a deeper sort, like a poet who, though less factual than a journalist in describing an event, may nevertheless reveal truths about it that find no place in the other’s literal grid.
How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals.
It struck me as awkwardly true that I had not much admired Provence before I began to study its depiction in van Gogh’s work. But in its desire to mock art lovers, Pascal’s maxim was in danger of skirting two important points. Admiring a painting that depicts a place we know but don’t like seems absurd and pretentious if we imagine that painters “do nothing but reproduce exactly what lies before them. If that were true, then all we could admire in a painting would be the technical skills involved in the reproduction of an object and the glamorous name of the painter, in which case we would have little difficulty agreeing with Pascal’s description of painting as a vain pursuit. But as Nietzsche knew, painters do not merely reproduce; they select and highlight, and they are accorded genuine admiration insofar as their version of reality seems to bring out valuable features of it.
Furthermore, we do not have to resume our indifference to a place once the painting of it that we have admired is out of sight, as Pascal hints. Our capacity to appreciate can be transferred from art to the world. We can find things that delight us on a canvas first but then later welcome them in the place where the canvas was painted. We can continue to see cypresses beyond van Gogh’s paintings.
A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
Ruskin’s interest in beauty and in its possession led him to five central conclusions. First, beauty was the result of a number of complex factors that affected the mind both psychologically and visually. Second, humans had an innate tendency to respond to beauty and to desire to possess it. Third, there were many lower expressions of this desire for possession (including, as we have seen, buying souvenirs and carpets, carving one’s name on a pillar and taking photographs). Fourth, there was only one way to possess beauty properly, and that was by understanding it, by making oneself conscious of the factors (psychological and visual) responsible for it. And last, the most effective means of pursuing this conscious understanding was by attempting to describe beautiful places through art, by writing about or drawing them, irrespective of whether one happened to have any talent for doing so.
If drawing had value even when practised by those with no talent, it was, Ruskin believed, because it could teach us to see—that is, to notice rather than merely look. In the process of re-creating with our own hands what lies before our eyes, we seem naturally to evolve from observing beauty in a loose way to possessing a deep understanding of its constituent parts and hence more secure memories of it.
Ruskin was distressed by how seldom people noticed details. He deplored the blindness and haste of modern tourists, especially those who prided themselves on covering Europe in a week by train (a service first offered by Thomas Cook in 1862): ‘No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.
Yet Ruskin’s enthusiasm diminished as he began to note the devilish problem that photography created for the majority of its practitioners. Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
Photography alone could not, and cannot, ensure such eating. True possession of a scene is a matter of making a conscious effort to notice elements and understand their construction. We can see beauty well enough just by opening our eyes, but how long this beauty will survive in memory depends on how intentionally we have apprehended it. The camera blurs the distinction between looking and noticing, between seeing and possessing; it may give us the option of true knowledge, but it may also unwittingly make the effort of acquiring that knowledge seem superfluous. It suggests that we have done all the work simply by taking a photograph, whereas proper eating of a place—a woodland, for example—requires that we pose ourselves a series of questions such as ‘How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
The effectiveness of Ruskin’s word-painting derived from his method of not only describing what places looked like (‘the grass was green, the earth was grey-brown’) but also analysing their effect on us in psychological language (‘the grass seemed expansive, the earth timid’). He recognised that many places strike us as beautiful not on the basis of aesthetic criteria—because the colours match or symmetry and proportion are present—but on the basis of psychological criteria, inasmuch as they embody a value or mood of importance to us.
I had at least attempted to follow one strand of what Ruskin judged to be the twin purposes of art: to make sense of pain and to fathom the sources of beauty.