Art of Travel by Alain de Botton (1)

Part of my study abroad trip to London and Rome in September is a series of blog posts about some assigned readings, and reflections upon them. This is the twelfth such post, and is one of one about Alain de Botton’s Art of Travel.

Photography alone could not, and cannot, ensure such eating. True possession of a scene is a matter of making a concious 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 mal 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, wheres the proper eating of a place … requires that we pose ourselves a series of questions… These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.

– except from Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel

Botton is paraphrasing an argument made by John Ruskin in that passage. Ruskin railed against modern tourism and it’s focus on seeing as many places as quickly as possible, and how that meant that you never really saw anything at all. Rushing about, glancing at a painting long enough to be able to say that you “saw” it and then rushing on to the next. Never actually seeing, never apprehending or appreciating anything, tourism had turned into a mad scavenger hunt by people hoping to click off everything on their checklist so they could go back home and claim to have seen great art and brag about how much they did on their trip.

John Ruskin, image from wikipedia

One of our assignments for this trip is to make a sketch, a drawing of something we see. A work of art, a fountain, a building. Something where we will have to stop for a moment and really actually see, actually comprehend and appreciate what is before us.

I want to do more than one sketch, but our schedule for the two weeks is so full… I worry about how much I’ll actually see, how much time I’ll be able to devote to any one work of art, any interesting architectural detail, anything I see and want to take the time to actually “see” it and not just glance at it. It’s frustrating, but I already know that I am going to have to travel to London and Rome again someday, make a longer trip so I can spend more time appreciating what there is to see.