topics: |  philosophy | travel

[Anticipation: How expectations differ from reality.  Van Gogh paintings -
cafe de nuit.  Abstraction - what is ignored. Arrrival in Barbados -
abstracted as one sentence - but the details of the experience - the type
of landing, the customs, baggage, etc are glossed over.  ]

QUOTES:
The Problem with Paradise

The prospect of a holiday is likely to persuade even the most downcast
among us that life is worth living. Aside from love, few pleasures are
anticipated more eagerly or form the subject of more complex or enriching
reveries. Holidays offer us perhaps our finest chance to achieve happiness,
being outside the constraints of work, our struggle for survival and
status. The way we choose to spend them embodies, if only unwittingly, an
understanding of what life might ideally be about. During the long working
weeks, we can be sustained by our dreams of going somewhere else, far from
home; a place with better weather, more interesting customs and inspiring
landscapes -- and where, it seems, we stand a chance of being happy.

But, of course, the reality of travel seldom matches the daydreams. The
tragi-comic disappointments are well-known: the sense of disorientation,
the mid-afternoon despair, the arguments, the lethargy before ancient
ruins. And yet the reasons behind such disappointments are rarely
explored. Almost never is a holiday considered as a philosophical problem,
that is to say as an issue requiring thought beyond the practical. We are
inundated with advice on where to go on holiday; we hear nothing of why and
how we should go. We implicitly hold that travelling is something we are
born knowing how to do, and hence rarely take the time to reflect on why
exactly the weekend in Rome or the summer in Greece didn't turn out to be
quite what we had imagined.

What, then, are some of the reasons our travels go awry? One of them stems
from the perplexing fact that when we look at pictures of places we want to
visit, and imagine how happy we would be if only we were there, we are
prone to forget one crucial thing: that we will have to take ourselves
along on the journey. We won't just be in India / South Africa / Australia
/ Prague / Peru in a direct, unmediated way, we'll be there with ourselves,
still imprisoned in our own bodies and minds -- with all the problems that
entails.

I remember a trip to a Caribbean island a few years ago. I looked forward
to it for months, picturing the beautiful hotel on the shores of a sandy
beach (as promised in a glossy brochure called Winter Sun). But on my first
morning on the island, I realised something at once obvious and surprising:
I had brought my body with me and, because of a fateful arrangement in the
human constitution, my interaction with the island was critically dependent
on its co-operation. The body proved a temperamental partner. Asked to sit
in a deckchair so that the mind could savour the beach, the trees and the
sun, it collapsed into difficulties; the ears complained of an enervating
wind, the skin of stickiness and the toes of the sand lodged uncomfortably
between them. After 10 minutes, the entire machine threatened to
faint. Unfortunately, I had brought along something else that risked
clouding my appreciation of my surroundings: my mind in its entirety -- not
only the aesthetic lobe (which had planned the journey and agreed to pay
for it), but also the part committed to anxiety, boredom, melancholy,
self-disgust and financial alarm.

At home, as my eyes had panned over the seductive photographs of the
island, I had felt oblivious to anything besides their contents. I had
simply been in the pictures; at one with their elements. I had imagined an
agenda-less, neutral observer: pure consciousness. But worries, regrets,
memories and anticipations were to prove constant companions on the
Caribbean island, acting like panes of distorting glass between my self and
the world. On the first morning, during a swim in the bay followed by a
rest on the sand, I lost sight of my location, blinded by a catastrophic
anticipation of my professional future. In one vivid, scenario, a publisher
to whom I was beholden became so intransigent in his attitude towards my
employment ("I'm not a charity, am I?" he asked) that when I was tapped
lightly on the shoulder by a member of the hotel staff and asked whether I
might like a towel, I narrowly avoided bursting into tears. Even when
undistracted by anxieties, thoughts of the future diverted me from a
sincere involvement with the present. At home, I had imagined that the trip
would immerse me in a sequence of immobile (and contented) moments, but
abroad my mind could not rest at any single point, however pleasing,
without clamouring "What next?"

Another great problem of holidays is that they rob us of one of the
important comforts of daily life: the expectation that things won't be
perfect. In our daily routine, we are not supposed to be happy, we are
allowed -- encouraged, even -- to be generally dissatisfied and sad. But
holidays give us no such grace. They are the one time when we feel we have
failed if we cannot be happy. We are therefore prone not only to be
miserable on our travels, but also miserable about the fact that we are
miserable.

D H Lawrence once said that if two people are in love, they will be able to
have a nice time in a bare cell. I haven't yet had the opportunity to put
this theory to the test, but I do know that the opposite is true. If two
people are unhappy together, then no amount of luxury will ever solve the
problem. In short, psychology always comes before location -- something we
tend to forget when booking a holiday.

I remember a trip to a hotel in France with a girlfriend. The setting was
sublime, the room flawless, and yet we managed to have a row which, for all
the good our surroundings did us, meant that we might as well have stayed
at home. Our row (it started with who had left the key in the room and
extended to cover our relationship as a whole) was a reminder of the rigid,
unforgiving logic to which human moods seem subject -- and which we ignore
at our peril when we imagine that happiness must naturally accompany
beautiful scenery. Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic or
material goods seems critically dependent on first satisfying a more
important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need
for understanding, for love, expression and respect. We will not enjoy --
we are not able to enjoy -- sumptuous gardens and magnificent bedrooms with
en suite marble bathrooms when a relationship to which we are committed
abruptly reveals itself to be suffused with incompatibility and
resentments.

If we are surprised by the power of, for example, a single sulk to destroy
the beneficial effects of an entire holiday, it is because we misunderstand
what holds up our moods. We are sad at home and blame the weather and the
ugliness of the buildings, but on holiday in a nice place we learn that the
state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their
own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.

What, then, might we do to learn to be a little wiser about our travels? I
have seldom come across a more useful guide to travel than the 19th-century
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. His great insight was that we stand
a much higher chance of being content if we accept that we're unlikely ever
to be completely happy. He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us
from the expectations (on holiday and otherwise) that inspire
bitterness. It is consoling, when holidays have let us down, to hear that
happiness was never a guarantee. "There is only one inborn error," wrote
Schopenhauer, "and that is the notion that we exist in order to be
happy. So long as we persist in this inborn error the world seems to us
full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we
are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged
for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence... hence the countenances
of almost all travellers and elderly persons wear the expression of what is
called disappointment." They would never have grown so disappointed if only
they had set out on holiday with the correct expectations.

It may also be necessary to accept that the anticipation of travel is
perhaps the best part about it. Our holidays are never as satisfying as
they are when they exist in an as-yet-unrealised form, in the shape of an
airline ticket and a brochure. In the great 19-century novel Against
Nature, by J K Huysmans, the narrator goes on a few holidays which go wrong
and then decides never to leave home again. He remains in his study and
surrounds himself with a series of objects that facilitate the finest
aspect of travel: its anticipation. He reads travel magazines, he has
coloured prints on the walls like those in travel agents; windows, showing
foreign cities and museums. He has the itineraries of the major shipping
companies framed and he lines his bedroom with them. He fills an aquarium
with seaweed, buys a sail, some rigging and a pot of tar and is able to
experience the most pleasing aspects of along sea-voyage without any of its
inconveniences.

I continue to travel in spite of all these caveats. And yet there are times
when I, too, feel there might be no finer journeys than those provoked in
the imagination by remaining at home slowly turning the Bible-paper pages
of the British Airways Worldwide Timetable.