1 Alain de Botton relates the anecdote of his stay in Madrid where he felt too ‘shy’ to fully experience the sights and sounds. The brochures designed to give him guidance, only served to intimidate him further: “In their different ways they conspired to suggest than an exciting and multifarious phenomenon called Madrid was waiting to be discovered outside, made up of monuments, churches, museums, fountains, plazas and shopping streets.” De Botton implies the daunting nature of exploring Madrid independently in the hyperbolic “exciting and multifarious phenomenon”. The language makes the experience sound sophisticated and intimidating. The endless listing of tourist attractions only serves to amplify this effect.
De Botton’s artful use of contrast comes into play again as he responds to the energy and excitement offered by Madrid with “listlessness and self-disgust … indolence…My overwhelming wish was to remain in bed and, if possible, catch an early flight home.” The promise and energy of the landscape and its unknown, unfamiliar nature only intimidate de Botton further. He wants to run from it and return to the familiar.
2. In sharp contrast, de Botton introduces Alexander von Humboldt, an explorer renowned for his energy and intrepid nature. At the end of the chapter he composes a lengthy paragraph describing the achievements of Humboldt: “Humboldt transformed the state of knowledge. He travelled 15, 000 kilometres … He redrew the map of South America … He researched the earth’s magnetism, and was the first man to discover … He gave the first account … He mapped the streams …He measured the effects … He studied the kinship rituals …He compared the salinity …” Each achievement receives its own sentence so as not to diminish any one. The reader is left to reflect on the sheer magnitude of the achievements of this industrious traveller.
Of course, the reader can also not help but compare de Botton cowering under the sheets in his hotel, afraid even to eat in a foreign restaurant with the full and incredible life and achievements of Humboldt who bravely ventured forth into the unknown. De Botton’s final allusion to F.A. Schwarzenberg’s biography of Humboldt sums up the experience of both Humboldt and De Botton himself respectively: “What may be accomplished in a lifetime – and seldom or never is.”
So what is the point? We cannot help but reflect on the way individuals respond to unknown landscapes. Some find them daunting and instinctively turn away from the effort of their exploration while others find them a challenge. Humboldt explores both physical and intellectual landscapes on his travels and is rewarded with knowledge and insight that actually contributes to the growth of the wider society. Here it is suggested that the effort of interacting with new landscapes, whether they be physical or intellectual, results in considerable reward. In a touch of irony, de Botton’s own brave and honest exploration of the relationship between people and new landscapes in this novel also contributes to the reader’s understanding of human nature and the philosophies that underpin it.
3. In this section de Botton also explores the contrast between his expected and actual responses to the new landscape of Madrid. The quoted guidebook paints a majestic and historically significant portrait of Madrid as “the nerve centre of a mighty empire. Narrow streets with houses and medieval churches .. a Bourbon palace, the Palacio Real…” It culminates with the “Puerta del Sol … the spiritual and geographical heart of Spain”. In contrast, de Botton sees only “an undistinguished half-moon-shaped junction” and wonders “with mounting anxiety, what I was to do here, what I was to think.” Imaginative, descriptive language, clashes with the mundane to contrast the imagined landscape with the mundane reality he encounters and reflect on our relationships with places and what they suggest about us and our relationship with the wider world.
4. In contrast, “Humboldt had not been pursued by such questions…. His mission was unambiguous” De Botton repeats the accounts of Humboldt’s industrious pursuits, emphasised by active verbs and parallel construction: “He measured…He took readings … he landed … he threw himself into study…” But this time, instead of being impressed, instead of contrasting Humboldt favourably to de Botton, the reader is struck by the technical nature of Humboldt’s relationship to the landscape he “measures”, he “studies” and he “calibrates”. There is no aesthetic or spiritual appreciation of the places he explores. Even the “delicious” spring water is reduced to an observation on its temperature which was only “22.5oC while the air was 28.7oC.”
5. In this section, the writer tries to compare the differences between ‘factual’ and ‘touristic’ travellers or Humboldt and himself respectively. At first he observes that Humboldt’s interaction with the landscape is useful and “with utility comes an (approving) audience.” He points out that the approval of others would have motivated Humboldt in more difficult times and that the world was grateful for his discoveries. In contrast, he feels that the world is already known now and he cannot explore it the way Humboldt did.
6. De Botton concludes, as he sits “in a café on the Plaza Provincia” that “Anything I learnt would have to be justified by private benefit rather than by the interest of others. My discoveries would have to enliven me; they would have in some way to prove ‘life-enhancing’.” Ironically this epiphany itself, occurring in the simple act of sipping coffee, is ‘life-enhancing’.
Section 4 of this chapter has already suggested to the perceptive reader the ideas of Nietzsche, elucidated in this section: “the extraordinary assertion that collecting facts … was a sterile pursuit.” His relationship with manmade landscapes is far more philosophical where a tourist “can gaze at old buildings and feel ‘the happiness of knowing that one is not wholly accidental and arbitrary but grown out of a past as its heir, flower and fruit, and that one’s existence is … justified.” De Botton concludes that, according to Nietzsche’s ideas; “Instead of bringing back 1, 600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small, unfeted but life-enhancing thoughts."
7. De Botton draws another distinction between himself and Humboldt. The latter had no expectations. He was not ‘intimidated’ by the opinions and views of others and could decide for himself, the value of sights and experiences with the landscape. He uses the metaphor of “the compass of curiosity" that is “being spun by the unexpectedly powerful force-field” of his guidebook instead of being allowed to find its own “true north” in the things that genuinely interested him such as “the smallness of male feet and … attitude towards modern architecture” where Spanish attempts to be ‘modern’ result in “vile bronze façade (as though modernity were a longed-for good that one needed in extra-strong doses to compensate for an earlier lack)”.
Like Nietzsche, de Botton is allowing the landscape to speak to him of the people and human nature that created it. He is making his own , more subtle discoveries.
8. De Botton reflects on the idea that Humboldt’s scientific connection to the landscape came about because of his natural curiosity in the natural world that started as a child. This suggests tha our connection to landscapes extends from our natural, and individual curiosity about the world around us. Thus, it would follow that our relationships to places are, themselves individual and unique.
9. De Botton emphasises “the importance of having the right question to ask of the world” if we are to benefit from experiencing new places. These questions must inspire curiosity (which his guidebook does not). According to the writer, one must stand before a landscape and find the right questions to create a “chain of curiosity”. In order to truly appreciate places and landscapes, we need to “build up the necessary receptivity”. What he means is that we need to be able to connect it to questions we have about our world if it is to have any real meaning.
According to the writer, “Travel twists our curiosity according to a superficial geographical logic, as superficial as if a university course were to prescribe books according to their size rather than subject matter.” There is always the tendency when we visit a new city to visit all the attractions in close proximity at the same time, but de Botton’s analogy illustrates the futility of such attempts. No matter how close they are to each other, two features of a foreign landscape may not connect to the same question or “chain of curiosity” and should not, therefore, be explored together.
His key point here is that our interaction with the world around us must be related to our own questions and curiosity. We cannot be told what is important or significant in a new landscape; such value judgements depend on our own natures and interests.
10. Structurally, the chapter comes a full circle, to end where it began, but with a conclusion. De Botton points out that Humboldt’s achievements were many, but there are many reasons that others do not emulate him, and there is no shame in an individual’s more ambivalent feelings towards new lands and his "strong wish to remain in bed and take the next flight home".