WHO Alain de Botton is a British novelist, essayist and broadcaster, and the author most recently of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
WHAT A Journey Around My Bedroom, by Xavier de Maistre; Infrastructure, by Brian Hayes; The Elements of Drawing, by John Ruskin
WHY It is the time of the year to go travelling, and I'm tailoring my reading to the season. It might seem perverse to rank among my all-time favourite travel books the story of a man who didn't even leave his house. Nevertheless, there's much to savour in the idiosyncratic book first published in 1794 called A Journey Around My Bedroom (Voyage autour de ma chambre) written by a 27-year-old Frenchman, Xavier de Maistre. It tells the story of how de Maistre one day decides to spend a day locked up in his bedroom, travels carefully around it and discovers in it all kinds of unexpected richness and interest.
De Maistre's work, however jokey, springs from a profound and suggestive insight: that the pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination to which we travel. If only we could apply a travelling mindset to our own districts, we might find these places becoming no less interesting than the high mountain passes and jungles of South America. Satisfied by the confines of his own bedroom, Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen.
But if you do decide to leave home, there can be few more interesting books to read than Brian Hayes's recent book, Infrastructure, which subtitles itself as a “travel guide” to the industrial landscape. Hayes started writing the book out of a frustration with our disdain for the machinery and processes of modern life. He wants us to stop not in order to admire a field of flowers or to go to a museum, but to consider the peculiar beauty of a power station. He tells us with some pride that he once took a holiday in southern Italy, but visited not a single museum.
Hayes's book is divided into thirteen chapters, each one of which tackles a key piece of the industrial jigsaw. There are chapters on power plants, power grids, communications, roads, trains, bridges and tunnels, planes, ships and (a particularly fascinating one) waste disposal. Reading the book has the strange effect of taking one back to childhood, for that was the last time being interested in such things was considered a good way to pass the time. One comes away from the book full of admiration for human beings and their relentless ingenuity in the face of practical challenges.
The most common response to seeing something beautiful in the world is to take a picture of it or grab the video camera. But this wasn't always the way, and 19th-century art critic John Ruskin, who lived at just the time that people started using cameras, has some fascinating criticisms to make of the camera in a book which every traveller should read, The Elements of Drawing. In his view, taking pictures often prevents people from seeing. Rather than allowing them to see the world more clearly and remember it, it actually distracts them from patient observation.
Ruskin suggested that, when we go travelling, we keep the camera at home and instead resort to two things: drawing and writing. Even if we can't draw at all, Ruskin asked us to have a go, and his book tells us just how we should start to do so.
Drawing something, however badly, always helps you to notice it properly, as does trying to write it down in words. This is a book guaranteed to fix your memories far better than any camera.
