We sit in Christ Church meadows by the daffodils, watching a stream of toddlers drawn as if by magnetism to the mound of dirt beside the pathway. One rolls repeatedly down the mound until his father tells him they’re moving on.
“I don’t want to go,” says the boy.
“Well, we’re going, anyhow,” says the father, and scoops up his other son, dissapears behind some trees. Dirtboy takes one last lackluster plunge through the mess, then sprints after his family.

After sandwiches which are too big for our mouths, we share a banana. I practise pouting my lips, the Facebook face, the look that other girls take on when posing for profile photos. I can’t plump them up enough without looking demented, descending into giggles. I give up and we watch more children, attracted by the mound of dirt. We watch the toddlers who have just learnt to walk careening down the path, thrilled by their own movements, unsteady but unwavering in gusto and intent. The Man says maybe I’m a little like that, too.
“I get the impression,” he says, “that at the age of about four, you decided you’d mastered all the basics, and from then on out you were just going to read.”

It’s more or less true, I say back. (Later, walking down the flat surface of the High street, I trip spontaneously. More true than less true, I think).

At the kissing gate by Merton college he traps me, kisses me sweetly.
“Is that because no one can see us?” I say.
“It’s because it’s a kissing gate, you moron,” he says. Kisses me again.

After we circle the city with our footsteps we come to settle at a bar on the High street where we sit close to the window, watching pink blossoms shuddering in wind. He reads the paper while I attack Essays in Love. There’s the strange sadness of a Sunday as the afternoon wilts into evening, as we move away from weekend papers, ipmromptu picnics in the garden, towards alarm clocks, early morning stresses, hours spent at work.

I look up every so often to make a different point about de Botton’s book. At the reference to Aristophanes, I balk.
“I find the idea that we’re all looking for someone who was once a part of ourselves really lonely,” I say. “Like, I want the person I love to be different. I want company.”
“I’m not sure that’s what that means,” he says. Whether he’s right or not I don’t know, but it highlights how differently we can read things. “It’s just about completion.”

A huge clock hangs from the cieling of the bar. It makes me feel both unwelcome and excessively desirous of staying all at the same time. The same way that being in a train station makes me feel. I know I’m in transition, but I could stay for hours, I think, watching everyone else, going somewhere else. Rhythms marked by a minute hand (is it coincidence, then, that the Man tells me this bar used to be a music store?).

Later, I finish Essays in Love in bed. I have read the entire book in a day and feel heavy with de Botton’s relationship woes. Sleep comes easy, and when it comes, it is quiet.

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Here is how I first came to read Alain de Botton:

We were babysitting for some friends who have a small (or not-so-small) library in literally every room of their house, including the bathroom (reason one thousand-and-one why we love them). So there I was looking at the shelf when what should I see but Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel. I had never heard of it, but the title appealed to me. I picked it up and started reading (which, if you didn’t know, and I didn’t for quite some time, is a very dangerous exercise in a house with three small boys who are liable to burst into the room at any time while you’ve got your trousers around your feet and are deeply engrossed in some work of literature or another). Half an hour later I came downstairs and said to The Man, why have I never read this before, it’s amazing? Who only said, I don’t know.

I find him fascinating, and inspiring, on a number of levels. He published his first book when he was 23–proof, perhaps, that you can become a serious member of the literary community whilst still in your youth (and even whilst still chronicling it). The Art of Travel, moreover, represents what I consider to be one of the most perfect genres of writing: both artistic and practical, thought-provoking and real, full of precise sentences and invitations to the reader to interact with the words themselves.

And, a few weeks ago, I came across this. It’s an interview with de Botton from 2002, just after The Art of Travel was published, and the author’s answers to some of the questions filled me with so much excitement that I realized I’d developed a virtual crush on the man, whose work has been described, rather brilliantly, as “essayistic” (I’m starting to use this term to describe my own work, in the hopes that it catches on). The interviewer, Robert Birnbaum, says to de Botton: “I read Kiss & Tell. That was essayistic?” and de Botton responds:

“Well, yes…Really, it was a reflection on different ideas. The point was not the plot so much as the ideas in it…it wasn’t totally straight fiction and I suppose I was just trying to move closer to what I felt was where my real interests lay. Which is in a non-fiction structure but which can allow for a certain amount of personal digressions and descriptions and some of the things that tend to belong in a novel.”

I centered on this because when I stumbled on the interview, I was in the midst of trying to categorize my own book. A non-fiction structure which allows for “personal digressions and descriptions and some of the things that tend to belong in a novel”: it’s more complicated than “travel” or “memoir”, but it’s just about a perfect description.

Then I read this, in response to a question about the book’s title (emphasis mine):

“It wasn’t that I set out with the idea that I’m going to cover the theme of travel. What I wanted to do was to cover certain feelings that we have in certain places, the psychology of places. That could be the subtitle. I was looking around for a form in which to gather together these thoughts and it seemed to me that travel is one of the times that we experience different feelings about different places. So that’s really the unity. I would get annoyed—well not annoyed—I’d think that people would miss the point if they said, “But you haven’t covered packing.” I hadn’t covered the impact of modern travel on the environment. I’m not trying to cover all aspects of travel. I’m really looking at particular aspects of it.“

Always an elegant and apt wordsmith, de Botton has put his finger on exactly what I want to write about: the psychology of places (or, in the case of the book, of one place in particular). I was practically giggling to myself by now. And the interview goes on, with Birnbaum asking, “What do you think of the assertion that all writing is travel writing?”

“There is a weird way in which modern publishing has put the word travel writing on anything that isn’t a story and is really about places,” de Botton responds. “The description of place has gone into travel writing. But travel writing goes into so many different strands.”

Then Birnbaum asks something which I find unecessary and inane: “I was amused when you related the tiff you and your traveling companion had over two portions of creme de caramel in Barbados,” he says. “It seemed strange that two adults would have such a conflict and that you would report it.”

And de Botton says back: “I think writing the book I felt an anxiety, “Maybe this is just too weird? Too trivial? Too something or other?…I think I lost confidence in my own experiences and descriptions. I think Jennifer Egan is right that what is wrong with the book is that there isn’t enough of me.”

And I think he’s right–not in there being something wrong with the book but in realising that he, as a person and not an author, would not detract from it; and, indeed, does not detract from it.

Of course, the interview is not all so smooth, or so deliciously focused on the (often misunderstood) literary portrayl of place. There are a lot of digs at Americans that I’d almost forgotten were so fashionable for awhile, especially in the wake of President Bush’s reaction to September 11th. You do still get it, of course, but I’ve lived abroad just long enough to forget this; and obviously we’re in the midst of a few glory months for America, when people are blaming those earlier feelings on poor national leadership, and are willing to make Americans seem human again.

Interestingly, though, if you read the interview closely you’ll see that a lot of it is the interviewer leading de Botton towards a question of American filthiness, as here, when Birnbaum asks if there are “national characteristics about how people see place and the way they travel from place to place?” which is, I think, an excellent question. De Botton responds:

“I’m sure there are. I think there are a lot of similarities in one what one could generally call the western attitude to places…I’m sure there are some differences. Americans get less time to travel. They travel a lot more in their own country—their country is much more diverse.”

To which Birnbaum responds, incongruously, “Americans don’t want to meet any foreigners.”

But masterfully, de Botton manages to divert the conversation beautifully near the end to explain that place is not as fragile as those afraid of globalisation think it is.

“I think generally the world is too big a place to succumb to this fear of homogeneity,” he says, to which Birnbaum asks, “Really?”

“I mean this idea that the whole world is going to become the same,” de Botton says. “We have two fears. One fear is that everything is the same and the other is that everything is completely different. In other countries people fry their children and make terrorists all the time: the twin poles. I think neither is true, completely. What’s interesting as a European is to discover the regional quality of the United States.”

“So we shouldn’t fear the advance of McDonald’s
into Paris and other places?” says (the apprently very wary) Birnbaum.

“No,” says de Botton, “these are very, very superficial differences. To take a tragic example, there was a McDonald’s in Bosnia, many branches of McDonalds. Everyone was eating hamburgers but then picked up guns and killed each other. It doesn’t mean that everyone thinks the same thing.”

“So these places are not American outposts. They become localized,” says Birnbaum, still unwiling to relent.

“Exactly. When Indian singers do take-offs of Madonna suddenly Madonna songs become Indian songs, in a way. You get these wonderful transmutations. This has always happened through out history,” says de Botton.

In terms far less eloquent (and far more outdated): word.

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I woke up this morning and thought, I’d really like to go for a run today, only it was pissing with rain, the streets slick and the eaves dripping. So I hunkered down in the study with several cups of lapsang souchong tea (there’s nothing like drinking tea that smells of woodfire smoke in winter to make you feel the season in your bones) and got to work. Several hours later I was so absorbed in my work I was surprised to notice that the day has cleared entirely, the sky blue through the empty branches of the plum tree outside my window. No, I still haven’t gone for my run.

I’m doing research, and in order to continue this post I’m going to have to admit once and for all something that I have a hard time saying aloud. Every time the words escape my lips I give a little schoolgirl giggle, blush furiously, and backtrack out of embarrasment. But, I’m writing a book (yes, a book, b-o-o-k and no, you do not need to tell me how unlikely literary success is in this age), and today I’ve been searching for information on the best way to pitch said book to literary agents.

The problem, of course, is that said book belongs to a genre that is nebulous at best. It’s certainly not fiction, but it’s also not a biography, an analysis of current events, a how-to book. Okay, so it must be something else? How about memoir, or narrative nonfiction. According to one site memoir is “the only nonfiction subject that must be treated as fiction,” while “narrative nonfiction…is still nonfiction and you would submit a proposal.” Which is fine, except that my book is not memoir, strictly speaking, and neither is it narrative nonfiction, strictly speaking, if I’m to believe what I read (narrative nonfiction: The Perfect Storm, Seabiscuit, et cetera). The only way I’ve ever been able to pinpoint what I’m writing is by comparing it to other things, kind of like a movie pitch. It’s The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton meets Sun After Dark by Pico Iyer meets The Flaneur by Edmund White meets All Souls by Javiar Marias (which is a novel, confusingly) meets Isolarian by James Atlee–you get the point. And obviously, the more I think about it, the deeper I fall into the abyss of finding the genre.

So I’m stepping away from that for awhile. Something I read this morning advised the author to “look at the value your book offers to the reader,” and that’s something I can do much more easily. It makes me think of Roger Mudd asking Ted Kennedy in 1979: “Why do you want to be president?” and Ted Kennedy botching the answer, not knowing, not being able to compensate for never having thought about a question that sounds too basic to be problematic. It was one of the greatest lessons of my undergraduate degree: if you’re going to run for president (or write a book, for that matter), you should sure as hell be able to answer the question “why.”

Why? Because I’m too young to write a book; because there’s no reason I can think of for someone to remain silent because of age or experience. Because while we may be entering an era of austerity, the election of Barack Obama indicates that we’re finally, eight years late, exiting an era of intellectual shrinkage. We’re becoming curious again*, and suddenly, the way in which we view the world–as individuals, as a generation, as the human race–is becomming important. Because sometimes a city is not just a dot on the map but a state of mind, and this affects us, whether we think about it or not. Because the art of experiencing place is a universal art; there is a backdrop to everything. Because the more we think about where we are–physically, geographically, generationally, emotionally, intellectually–the better we’re able to understand where we’re going. And because there’s always something to be said for a few pretty words on a page. It’s finer entertainment than anything else I can think of.

*Obama: “But those values upon which our success depends – hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old.”

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