Michael: The worst part of your vacation might actually be the best part. I'm talking about the layover, the dingy motel, the roadside diner. Today, we're exploring why the journey's most forgettable moments are the ones that truly define the art of travel. Kevin: Whoa, that's a bold claim. My last layover involved a delayed flight and a questionable Cinnabon. I'm not sure I'd call that the 'best part' of anything. It sounds like you've been reading something that turns suffering into a virtue. Michael: You're not wrong. That's the provocative idea at the heart of Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel. Kevin: Alain de Botton... he's that philosopher who makes big ideas feel personal, right? I heard he once spent a whole week as a writer-in-residence at Heathrow Airport, just watching people. That feels like the perfect origin story for a book like this. Michael: Exactly. He's less interested in telling you where to go and more interested in how you see. And that journey of perception, he argues, often starts in the most unlikely places imaginable. Kevin: Unlikely is one word for it. You're not going to tell me the security line is a place of profound spiritual awakening, are you? Michael: Not the line itself, perhaps. But the feeling of being in-between? The airport gate, the train carriage, even the motorway service station? According to de Botton, these are places of unexpected poetry.

Kevin: Okay, but a motorway service station? Really? I'm thinking sticky floors, the smell of stale coffee, and fluorescent lights that make everyone look vaguely ill. Where is the poetry in that? Michael: De Botton starts there precisely because it's so un-poetic on the surface. He tells this story of driving late at night, feeling dizzy and disconnected. He pulls into one of these glass-and-brick service stations. It's warm and brightly lit against the dark, empty landscape. Inside, there's a handful of strangers: a woman stirring her tea, a family eating burgers, an old man doing a crossword. No one knows each other, but they're all sharing this one, temporary, anonymous space. Kevin: That just sounds… lonely. A collection of lonely people under one roof. Michael: That's one way to see it. But de Botton finds a strange comfort in it. He says these places—what sociologists call 'liminal spaces'—offer a kind of freedom. At home, you have responsibilities, a fixed identity. But in a service station at midnight, you're just a traveler. You're anonymous. Your thoughts can wander because the world isn't making any demands on you. It’s a temporary escape from the confinement of the ordinary world. Kevin: Huh. I guess I can see that. It's like being on a long flight. No one can email you, no one can call. You're in this metal tube in the sky, and you can just… think. Or watch three bad movies in a row. Michael: Exactly. And de Botton connects this feeling to the art of Edward Hopper. Hopper’s paintings are full of these scenes: a woman alone in a late-night cafeteria in Automat, a gas station attendant standing by his pumps at dusk in Gas. They're melancholic, for sure. They capture a sense of isolation. Kevin: Can you describe one? So I can really picture what you mean. Michael: Think of Automat. It's a 1927 painting. A woman is sitting by herself at a small, round table in a brightly lit, sterile-looking cafeteria. It’s late at night. She's holding a coffee cup, but she's staring into it, looking a little lost, maybe a little sad. The background is just a dark window reflecting the rows of lights. There's this profound sense of solitude. Kevin: Yeah, that sounds pretty bleak. Michael: It is, but Hopper finds a strange beauty in it. He suggests that these public, transient places can be sanctuaries for people who feel like outsiders in the 'normal' world. In that cafeteria, that woman is alone, but she's also part of a silent community of other lonely souls. There's an empathy there. De Botton argues that these spaces, like Hopper's paintings, offer a kind of solace. They acknowledge the sadness and dislocation that are part of life, instead of pretending it doesn't exist. Kevin: So the poetry isn't in the place itself, but in the shared human experience it represents? The feeling of being adrift, together. Michael: Precisely. The French poet Baudelaire had a term for it: the "poésie des départs"—the poetry of departures. He was one of the first to find beauty in modern traveling places: harbors, train stations, hotel rooms. For him, these places were more of a home than his actual house, because they were filled with the promise of escape and the quiet dignity of being in motion. Kevin: I like that. The poetry of departures. It reframes the whole experience. The journey isn't just a tedious necessity to get to the beach. The journey itself has its own unique, melancholic value. Michael: And that shift in perception is everything. It's the first step in the 'art' of travel. But it raises another question. What happens when you finally do get to the beach, or the beautiful city, and you still feel… nothing?

Kevin: Oh, I know that feeling. The traveler's guilt. You've spent all this money, you're standing in front of a world-famous landmark, and you're supposed to be feeling profound awe, but you're just thinking about the crowds, or the fact that your feet hurt, or what you're going to have for lunch. It’s the worst. Michael: It's a universal experience, and de Botton tackles it head-on. He tells this story about being invited to a farmhouse in Provence, in the south of France. He admits that the word 'Provence' meant almost nothing to him, except for a vague, clichéd image of lavender fields. Kevin: A place that's almost too famous for its own good. The expectations are sky-high. Michael: Exactly. So he arrives, and he's determined to be impressed. He drives through the countryside, stops at an olive grove, and... feels nothing. The olive trees look stunted, the wheat fields remind him of his dreary school days in England. He's bored and uncomfortable. He's in one of the most celebrated landscapes in the world, and it's just not landing. Kevin: That is painfully relatable. So what does he do? Just pretend to enjoy it for his friends? Michael: He almost does. But that night, unable to sleep, he picks up a book about Vincent van Gogh, who famously painted in that very region. He reads about Van Gogh's obsession with cypress trees. The artist described them as having "a line as beautiful as an Egyptian obelisk." Kevin: I've seen them in his paintings. They look like dark green flames reaching for the sky. Michael: A perfect description. And after reading that, de Botton looks out the window the next morning and for the first time, he really sees the cypresses in the garden. He notices how they move in the wind, not swaying, but shuddering, wrestling with it. He starts to see the landscape through Van Gogh's eyes. He notices the gnarled, angular shapes of the olive trees, the intense, almost vibrating colors of the fields. The landscape hasn't changed, but his ability to perceive it has. Kevin: So, is de Botton saying art is like a filter or a lens we can use? It's like putting on 'Van Gogh glasses' to see Provence? Michael: It's more than a filter. It's a guide. A great artist doesn't just copy reality; they select what's important. They draw our attention to features we would otherwise miss. Van Gogh saw the energy, the life force, in a cypress tree, and he painted that. Once you've seen his painting, you can't un-see that energy in the real tree. Art gives us a new visual vocabulary. Kevin: That makes so much sense. It explains why people travel to places because of art. They want to see the world the way Monet saw his water lilies, or the way Georgia O'Keeffe saw the New Mexico desert. Michael: It's a historical pattern. De Botton points out that the British only started appreciating their own rugged countryside—the Lake District, the Scottish Highlands—after artists began painting it in the 18th century. Before that, they thought it was just ugly and savage. They preferred the manicured, classical landscapes they saw in Italian paintings. Art literally taught an entire nation to find beauty in its own backyard. Kevin: Wow. So our sense of what's beautiful isn't innate. It's learned. We're all just following a curriculum designed by long-dead painters. Michael: In a way, yes. And that leads to the most radical idea in the whole book. Once you've learned this new way of seeing, this 'traveling mindset,' you don't necessarily need to go to Provence or the Alps to use it.

Kevin: Okay, now you've lost me. The whole point of travel is to go somewhere new. Michael: Is it? De Botton contrasts two very different kinds of travelers. First, you have someone like Alexander von Humboldt, the great 19th-century explorer. He spent five years trekking through South America, mapping rivers, cataloging thousands of new plants, measuring the Earth's magnetic field. An epic, fact-finding mission. Kevin: The ultimate adventurer. Got it. Who's the other one? Michael: The other is a French aristocrat named Xavier de Maistre. In 1790, after being confined to his quarters for 42 days for fighting a duel, he undertook a journey of his own. He wrote a book about it called A Journey around My Bedroom. Kevin: A journey around his bedroom? That sounds like my lockdown experience. What did he do, explore the mysterious land under his bed? Michael: (laughing) Pretty much! He put on his favorite pink-and-blue pajamas, and with the eyes of an explorer, he 'rediscovered' his own room. He writes about his armchair, not just as a piece of furniture, but as a welcoming friend for meditation. He looks at his bed and contemplates the dreams and nightmares, the life and death that happen there. He's applying the receptive, curious mindset of a traveler to the most familiar space imaginable. Kevin: That's both hilarious and kind of profound. He's fighting against habit. Michael: He's fighting the blindness of habit. That's the core of it. We walk down the same street every day and we stop seeing it. The buildings become a blur, the people are just obstacles. We're on autopilot. De Maistre's little book is a powerful argument that the pleasure we get from a journey depends more on our mindset than our destination. Kevin: I can definitely relate. When you first move to a new city, even the mailboxes and street signs seem fascinating and different. A year later, you don't even notice them. So how do we actually do this? How do I apply a 'traveling mindset' to my own neighborhood without feeling like a weirdo staring at a lamppost? Michael: De Botton, inspired by de Maistre, tries it himself in his London neighborhood of Hammersmith. He forces himself to slow down and just look. He starts noticing architectural details he's passed a thousand times—the specific pattern of the brickwork, the style of a window frame. He looks at the faces of people on the bus, not as a crowd, but as individuals with their own stories. Kevin: So it's about conscious, deliberate attention. Turning off the autopilot. Michael: Exactly. And another tool he borrows from the 19th-century critic John Ruskin is the idea of 'word-painting.' Ruskin argued that the best way to possess beauty isn't to buy a souvenir or even take a photo, which can be a passive act. It's to try and describe it, either by drawing it or by writing about it. Kevin: Even if you're a terrible artist? Michael: Especially if you're a terrible artist! The point isn't to create a masterpiece. The point is that the act of trying to draw something forces you to see it with an incredible intensity. You have to notice every line, every shadow, every texture. You build a memory of it that's far deeper than a quick snapshot. You can do the same with words. Try to describe a familiar tree in your park as if you're seeing it for the first time. You'll be amazed at what you notice.

Michael: So, it all comes together in a really elegant way. We start by learning to find beauty in the 'ugly' or overlooked parts of travel, the in-between spaces. Then, we learn from artists how to see the conventionally 'beautiful' parts more deeply, to appreciate the details. And finally, we realize that this way of seeing—this receptive, curious mindset—is a portable skill. It's a tool we can use anywhere, even in our own homes. Kevin: The art of travel isn't about collecting passport stamps. It's about cultivating a certain kind of attention. It’s about fighting the numbness of routine. Michael: That's the heart of it. The book is a quiet rebellion against the idea that happiness is always somewhere else. It suggests that if we can learn to see properly, the world we already have is infinitely rich. Kevin: It makes you wonder, what have you stopped seeing on your own daily commute? What would an artist notice about your office or your kitchen? It's a powerful question because the answer is probably 'a lot.' Michael: It's a great question. And it’s a challenge, really. We'd love to hear what you discover. Find us on our socials and share one beautiful, overlooked detail from your everyday world this week. A crack in the pavement that looks like a river, the way the light hits a building at a certain time of day. Anything. Kevin: Let's start a collection of everyday wonders. I love that. It feels like the perfect takeaway from a book that is, ultimately, deeply hopeful about our capacity to find joy right where we are. Michael: Couldn't have said it better myself. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.