Emily Thomas's Reading List

"You asked for my five book choices about the philosophy of travel, but the philosophy of travel doesn’t exist in a coherent way. So, I’ve simply picked books about travel which engage with various philosophical issues. They are, if you like, thoughtful books about travel. My first choice is a book by Marjorie Hope Nicolson called Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. It was written in the 1950s and it was the very first book, as far as I’m aware, that makes the argument that the philosophy of space had a huge impact on mountain tourism. “In theory she was a professor of literature, but in reality she delved into science and philosophy and anything else that she fancied” Nicolson was a literary scholar at Columbia University. In theory she was a professor of literature, but in reality she delved into science and philosophy and anything else that she fancied. This book is highly readable. She has a very pleasant, direct style. She makes it seem effortless, the way she weaves together the science and the philosophy and poetry. She explores the ideas around absolute space we discussed earlier, and also absolute time. This is the idea that time is an infinite, eternal container, identified with God. People were also beginning to shrug off biblical ideas of creation as happening four to six thousand years ago. So she argues that people were getting a sense of geological time for the first time and she thinks that that also feeds into this fresh appreciation of mountains. They’re giving you a sense of the timescales that God is working at. This stuff actually comes first. The way that Nicolson describes it is that these philosophers of space and time are laying the foundations for an aesthetics of the infinite, for an appreciation of infinite-seeming things, like mountain ranges. The sublime comes quite a bit later. These absolute theories of space and time are all invented from 1650 to 1690 and she thinks they began to seep through into poetry and literature and then into travel around the early 1700s, so in the early 18th century. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . She picks on Thomas Burnett, who was a philosopher and a scientist. He wrote an amazing book called The Theory of the Earth that seeks to explain everything in the universe. It starts with the way our Earth was created and the way geology works, how mountains and seas form. She thinks that Burnett was a transitional figure. On the one hand, he’s picking up these ideas about absolute space and time and he seems to be applying them to mountains. He talks with awe about how big they are, how they are God’s handiwork on Earth. On the other hand, he’s still a bit repulsed by them. She thinks that he is a midway point between these absolute theories of space and what would become the full-blown aesthetics that you get in poets like Byron, who are describing mountains as cathedrals. Yes! For these guys, the emphasis is what’s out there, not their reactions to it."

"Mary Wollstonecraft was an 18th-century English philosopher. She’s best known for authoring a book called A Vindication of the Rights of Women where she argues that women should be treated equally to men, especially with regard to education. When she was writing in the late 1700s, there was a widespread belief that women didn’t have the same mental capacities as men, that they weren’t suited to study things like mathematics or science or philosophy. She argued that wasn’t true—women just weren’t educated in these things. If we were all educated the same, women could participate as well as men. She’s best known as a philosopher and in particular as a feminist philosopher, but she also wrote this travel book. The backstory to this travel book is the stuff that soap operas are made of. She had an affair with an American privateer, Gilbert Imlay. She was living in England and then she moved to Paris for a little while, which is where she met him. They had what appears to be a passionate love affair and she became pregnant. They were married (not legally but informally) so he described her as his ‘wife.’ Although it seems that he was unfaithful, she then went to Scandinavia on his behalf to conduct some business. And it was revealed, in the late 20th century, that she was trying to get hold of some treasure of his that may or may not have been on a ship that had sunk. Yes. She went to Scandinavia with her young baby and a maid. She left them behind in one of the cities while she travelled inland through Sweden, Norway and Denmark alone. It was a hell of a thing to do for a woman back then. She wanted money because she wanted independence from Imlay. So she began writing her Letters . The book is presented as a series of letters to a friend, but of course they’re not regular letters—it’s an extremely well-crafted piece of work. Yes, it’s an epistolary book. It’s important in a number of ways. One thing that happened in the 17th century was Francis Bacon developed this new philosophy of science. He said that we can’t find out about the world by sitting in an armchair; we have to go out and bring back information about it. After Bacon’s death, the British Royal Society carried through this project. They began paying sailors, travellers and merchants to bring back all kinds of information about minerals, animals, flowers—whatever they could think of. Yes, it is. Aristotle did that and then the whole process was abandoned. There was a lull of more than 1500 years and then Bacon picked it up again. Something that went hand in hand with this project was that they asked travellers to write in a straightforward, factual style, which had a massive impact on travel writing. Lots of travel writing before this period was frankly made up. If you read books like The Travels of Sir John Mandeville , he’s happily writing about unicorns and men who have the heads of dogs. Separating fact from fiction in travel writing was a problem. “Francis Bacon said that we can’t find out about the world by sitting in an armchair; we have to go out and bring back information about it” So everybody began writing in this dull, third-person, scientific style. It’s the sort of thing that you still see in Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle or Captain Cook’s Journals . The tales themselves are gripping, but the writing is often boring. Mary Wollstonecraft was well aware of this. Back in London, she had worked as a writer and an editor for a magazine and read and reviewed dozens of travel books. So in her own travel writing she sets out to do something different. She explains at the start of this book, ‘I couldn’t help but make myself the hero of every little tale. I realize that this is contrary to what normally happens, but I’m going to do it anyway.’ She goes on to describe, in the first person, her own reactions to mountains and glaciers and lakes. She’s knee-deep into the philosophy of the sublime and there’s been some literary scholarship over the last five years in particular that’s shown she wasn’t just a pioneer of travel writing about the sublime—she was a leader. She wasn’t the first person to come up with the theory of the sublime. She was the first person to apply that seriously to travel writing, this feeling of pleasurable terror that you get from looking at a sublime scene. It’s a lovely book to read. She’s a really engaging writer. She reads as a very modern writer, despite the fact it’s a few centuries old. It’s also shot through with her observations on the stage of women in these countries. She’s furious at the way some women are treated, and she has a cutting pen."

"My third choice is Walden by Henry David Thoreau . I think Walden is the least readable of the books that I’ve chosen, because it starts with a long, rambling passage about what he thinks about the state of politics and economics. It includes his famous line “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” You’re right that it’s important, but it’s hard going. Once you get past that, then suddenly you’re into these beautiful and inspiring descriptions of nature. Thoreau did a fair amount of travelling, outside of Walden . In his other books he goes on these long hikes. This book is really about travelling into wilderness. I don’t think that travelling need involve going very far. You could travel within a few miles of your house. What’s crucial is to put yourself in unfamiliar surroundings. And I think that’s what he manages to do. There are these amazing, elegant, long passages where he describes sitting in the doorway of his cabin, lost in the sunshine and the birds flitting around the trees. Or where he’s looking out at the pond and describing the way the ice is frozen and the crazing of the cracks. It’s enchanting and it has inspired swathes of travel nature writing—as well as people going off and building their own cabins in the wilderness. There’s a craze right now for ‘cabin porn’—if you Google it, you will be pleasantly surprised by what you find. So many of the articles about it reference Thoreau’s Walden. There’s very much an underlying metaphysics—theory of reality. So where his friend (and senior tutor, if you like) Emerson is in love with nature and for Emerson nature is a symbol or a representation of God, for Thoreau nature is God. There’s no remove for him. When he’s looking into the ice at Walden Pond, he’s looking into God’s creation. The whole book, these beautiful nature passages, they feel very strongly anchored in this underlying philosophy of how the world is. With Thoreau I don’t get the vibe that he wants to be solitary in order to think. Rather, he wants to be solitary in order to be closer to nature. It’s a variation on the theme, but certainly seems very different to Wittgenstein, who wanted to be a solitary genius working out ideas without anyone to bother him. Yes, it’s an experiment, though if I’m honest, I personally am much less interested in the social aspects of it. I’m more interested in the engagement with nature. That’s what I really love about the book. It’s okay that other people like aspects of it that I don’t. That’s allowed."

"It’s a thoughtful account of de Botton’s engagement with artists about travel. He focuses on painters and novelists with a view to asking what light they can shed on why we travel, and picking up titbits from them for our own travels. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One of my favourite examples he discusses is Edward Hopper. Hopper painted places like bus stations, petrol stations, the sorts of in-between places that normally we disregard when we think about travelling. They’re not places we usually think about visiting. We’re thinking about seeing cathedrals or mountains. Hopper is painting all these in-between places that would never occur to us to pay attention to and de Botton asks, why? He asks why they’re good for us and he reflects on the fact that he quite enjoys spending time in motorway cafés, for example, or airport waiting lounges. Honestly no, I can’t. But it makes for a good couple of paragraphs. For him, these are places where it’s okay to be lonely and that’s the appeal of them. He thinks that’s what Hopper captured. That’s one of the ways that he’s looking at artists who have engaged with travel. He’s thinking, ‘What can I take away from this?’ He uses Hopper to explain why he enjoys being in these sorts of in-between places. Paul Theroux has a chapter in his Tao of Travel arguing that although many travel writers appear to travel alone, they don’t—including Bruce Chatwin . His wife doesn’t appear in the books, but apparently there is a long tradition of travel writers doing this: pretending to be travelling alone when in fact they have their partners with them. There’s a lovely quote from Ella Maillart on this. Reflecting on a 3,500 mile trip from Beijing to Kashmir, she writes that she prefers to travel alone because “a companion is in himself a detached ‘piece’ of Europe. When I have a companion by my side, together we build a foreign cell, a ‘resistance’ which can only with difficulty blend into new surroundings”. I think that’s true. I’ve done almost all of my travelling alone and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I think I’ve had more varied experienced as a result. It’s also been harder, which I think has added to the value for me. I also think local people are far more willing to talk to you if you’re alone—they feel sorry for you, and you’re clearly not a threat. I’ve particularly found that, when I’m alone, other women approach me happily. John Ruskin , the painter. Ruskin is all about these incredibly intricate, realistic drawings of nature. He painted many different things but this is what de Botton focuses on. Ruskin, in his view, shows that painting is one way of absorbing your environment, almost of capturing it. One way to think about it today is using mindfulness . If you are looking at something so intently that you are capturing every line and curve, then you are paying mindful attention to it. You have to be focused on that thing. De Botton, again, uses this as a way of saying, ‘this is one of the things we should do when we travel: we should pay attention to the world around us. And then take that back home with us, take these observations home.’ Yes, I agree and it can be invigorating to know how little you know. In our everyday lives we can complacently think, ‘I know lots of things.’ As soon as you’re somewhere unfamiliar you realize, ‘Gosh, I know almost nothing.’ You can’t speak the language. You can’t read the signs. You don’t understand the cultural cues that you’re surrounded by. You don’t know what the birds are, what the plants are. I think that’s useful as an experience for humans to have regularly. Which is amazing. It’s a good feeling to go somewhere and people are pleased that you’ve arrived, that they want you to see their home. The most obvious difference is that de Botton is interested in artists. He’s looking at what novelists and painters can tell us. Every now and then he brings in a philosopher, but the book is focused on novelists and painters, which is very different to what I’m trying to do, with my focus on what philosophers can tell us about travel. So the people we’re looking at is one of the differences. Also, what I’m interested in is telling the story of philosophical engagement with travel since the Age of Discovery, which is when philosophers got interested in travel. It’s not comprehensive, but I’m picking out the biggest episodes throughout that history. That’s not something that de Botton is doing. He’s a brilliant writer, so it’s an extremely easy read. It’s enlightening. It’s not about philosophy, but it’s very good. Incidentally, de Botton’s book shares a title with The Art of Travel by Francis Galton. This book is also entertaining, but for different reasons. It’s got lots of advice for the would-be explorer. Galton was a Victorian explorer and he often travelled with servants because although he was intrepid he was also very rich. So, for example, he warns you that if you are sleepy or deaf, you should never travel without your manservants."

"How to Talk About Places You ’ve Never Been by Pierre Bayard is perhaps the least philosophical of my choices. It’s about the importance of armchair travel. It’s written by a literary professor and it’s a tongue-in-cheek, extended argument as to why armchair travel can be even better than real world travel. Yes, I don’t know when we will be able to real world travel again, but in the meantime, this is a great humorous take on why we should all be armchair travelling. It’s written to be funny, but it’s packed with lots of serious material on the nature of armchair travel. The serious material is not tongue-in-cheek, but throughout the book his thesis—that armchair travel is always better than real world travel—is, I think, meant to be tongue-in-cheek. That’s a theme that you find in de Botton. Earlier, you asked about differences between my book and de Botton’s. Here is another one. I once read a Guardian review of The Art of Travel that complained de Botton doesn’t seem to like travel very much. I get that feeling too—it comes across in his discussions about the expectation of travelling being better than the reality. I hope, in my book, it comes across that I love it. Bayard is concerned with a number of things including the fact it’s much safer to travel by armchair than in the real world. There’s none of the inconvenience, you can remain sleeping in your own bed, you don’t have to faff around with porters or train tickets and endure long and uncomfortable journeys. It’s a lot easier, you don’t run into difficulties and you can learn much more about a place by reading about it than by visiting. And he goes on to provide lots of examples. “Something that I loved learning about is the history of travel writing. I hadn’t appreciated, for example, that it really exploded in the 17th century” These include, for example, a French travel writer called Chateaubriand. He wrote lots about visiting the United States and large chunks of it seem to have been made up. There are rivers in his books and places that move around when he’s describing different locations in the States—but that doesn’t seem to matter because it’s as though he’s captured the essence of the places, even though he never visited. The book is brilliant—very funny. He uses his own system of notations that say things like ‘NV’ for never visited. He covers the Marco Polo controversy. Marco Polo in theory travelled widely through Asia including China, yet lots of scholars think he never got any further than Constantinople. But perhaps he didn’t need to. I think you could run a Mary’s Room thought argument about this. Mary is sitting in a room, with guidebooks about Japan. If she is then transported to Japan, does she learn anything new? Yes. I certainly think Mary would learn something new where she to step out onto the streets of Japan. But I do think she could learn an awful lot from books as well. I love books as much as I love travelling. I think so too. Something that I loved learning about is the history of travel writing. I hadn’t appreciated, for example, that it really exploded in the 17th century. I thought it would have been around in quantity for a lot longer. The Age of Discovery blew the whole thing up. I suspect the printing press also had something to do with it. Travel to far flung places was easier and books were more readily available. The book is not obviously raising philosophical issues, though if you run something like the Mary’s Room thought experiment, you can make it philosophical. But one of the issues simmering below the surface of the entire book is, ‘what is the relationship between fact and fiction?’ That is hugely philosophical, the relationship between the world inside our heads and the world out there. That runs like a thread through the whole book and I think it’s fabulous."