The Art of Travel

Alan de Botton ★★★★★

An inspiring cultural read about visual arts and literature from the perspective of a traveller. A bit too ornamented, but nicely written prose.

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.

I was to discover an unexpected continuity between the melancholic self I had been at home and the person I was to be on the island, a continuity quite at odds with the radical discontinuity in the landscape and climate, where the very air seemed to be made of a different and sweeter substance.