EMOTIONS AND THOUGHTS
Chapter 1: On Anticipation

'any sadness I might have felt... seemed to find ready encouragement' in the bad weather
the use of emotive language to describe language reflects his emotional state - confused, relentless, ominous, desolate
'might be influenced by the simplest and most un-examined images of happiness'
after a quarrel with his girlfriend, the authors mood 'refused to be lifted by any external prop'
a photograph of a couple on an empty, sunny beach, dwarfed by palm trees suggests perfect tranquility, thus contrasting the experiences of de Botton and M
'our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent' on our emotions
'Nature was at her most benevolent' - the personification of nature emphasizes its beauty to the author, but this is later contrasted with the lack of effect this has on his emotions
'the appearance of our dwellings can never n their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery'
travel is a displacement activity which enabled one to temporarily escape from everyday life

Chapter 2: On Travelling Places

the author explores the way that our minds can be refreshed by new places, or produce great thoughts when thinking is not their only agenda
'Journeys are the midwives of thought' as 'large thoughts at times (require) large views, new thoughts new places'
the 'eternal mobility' of the plane offers 'an imaginative counterweight to feelings of stagnation and confinement' - 'the clouds usher in tranquility. Below us are enemies and colleagues, the sites of our terrors and our griefs'
the author is thankful for the lonely atmosphere of the service station, as he does not have to 'suffer from a contrast between my mood and the environment;' loneliness 'seemed to be acknowledged and brutally celebrated by the architecture and lighting'
de Botton supports this argument through interxtual use of the paintings of Edward Hopper
'Automat' is described as a 'picture of sadness' in which the woman's bleak surroundings appear to invite and accept her loneliness
his paintings depicted bleakness in a way which 'allowed their viewers to witness an echo of their own grief and thereby feel less personally persecuted and beset by it'
Charles Baudelaire wrote that 'it always seems to me that I'll be well where I am not' but found that 'we were often bored, just as we are here'
he used a metaphor to describe life as 'a hospital in which every patient is obsessed with changing beds.''
de Botton identifies with Baudelaire in that he was drawn to 'transient places of travel'
Baudelaire used personification to explore the connection between travel and emotions, describing a ship as 'a vast, immense, complicated and agile create, an animal full of suffering and heaving all the sighs and ambitions of humanity''

Chapter 6: On the Sublime

'I set out for the desert in order to be made to feel small'... which is 'usually unpleasant'
a sublime place was not one with any particular characteristics but which had power to 'arouse the mind to sublimity'
Botton described it as 'human weakness in the face of the strength, age and size of the universe'
sublime places remind us of the 'familiar inadequacy... that the universe is greater than we are' in a more helpful way than we are reminded of this in our daily lives
even in secular minds, sublime landscapes '(bring) us to accept without bitterness or lamentation the obstacles we cannot overcome'
he makes biblical allusion to Job, when God answers Jobs cries by bidding him to contemplate the landscape - he discerns that things go wrong and we don't understand them because the universe is bigger than we are, and that this message is found in sublime landscapes
extended metaphor of dust symbolising human mortality, the transient nature of our lives - which sublime landscapes make us aware of

Chapter 7: On Eye-Opening Art

he 'lacked the energy' at the time to register the beauty he later recognised - in this way, his feelings informed his experience
'we overlook certain places because nothing has ever prompted us to conceive of them as worthy of appreciation, or because some unfortunate but stray association has turned us against them'

Chapter 8: On Possessing Beauty

his use of psychological language to describe the effect of nature suggests that we find places beautiful which 'embody a value or mood of importance to us' - "the grass seemed expansive, the earth timid''

Chapter 9: On Habit

London reminded him of 'the indifference of the world to any of the events unfolding in the lives of its inhabitants' - Botton revisits his earlier point, that landscape may exacerbate or lessen our current mood, but does not entirely change it
de Botton is condemned to return to the place which motivated his escape in the first place, and it is unchanged
traveling around his neighborhood with this mindset, the landscape 'began to collect ideas' - by observing his surroundings, Botton found himself intellectually stimulated by them
'our responses to the world are crucially moulded by whom we are with' - being alone, Botton found the freedom to áct a little weirdly', to experience the landscape in an authentic way, untempered by the expectations or inhibitions of others
'the city had stubbornly refused to change'; 'the home town was unimpressed' with his travels - by imbuing his home town with human qualities through personification, Botton creates an impression of active hostility which works against him on his return home

	Created by Alex Watson about 10 years ago

Higher School Certificate English (Representations of Landscapes) Note on Examples from the Art of Travel, created by Alex Watson on 03/08/2016.