"The Art of Travel"

[fiefoe]

Baudelaire/Hopper:

• (Baudelaire) complained of suffering from 'that appalling disease: the Horror of Home'
• 'Those large and beautiful ships, invisibly balanced (hovering) on tranquil waters, those hardy ships that look dreamy and idle, don't they seem to whisper to us in silent tongues: `When shall we set sail for happiness?'
• The doors of the holds are opened to disgorge battered aluminium cargo crates, perhaps containing fruit that only a few days ago hung from the branches of tropical trees, or vegetables that had their roots in the soil of high, silent valleys.
• (TVs at the airport:) their absence of aesthetic self-consciousness and whose workmanlike casing and pedestrian typefaces do nothing to disguise their emotional charge and imaginative allure. Tokyo, Amsterdam, Istanbul; Warsaw, Seattle, Rio. The screens hear all the poetic resonance of the last line of James Joyce's Ulysses, which is at once a record of where the novel was written and, no less important, a symbol of the cosmopolitan spirit behind its composition: 'Trieste, Zurich, Paris.'
• There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane's ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation.
• ... despite the bleakness they depict, are not themselves bleak to look at but rather allow the viewer to witness an echo of his or her own grief and thereby to feel less personally persecuted and beset by it.
• In 1906, at the age of twenty-four, Hopper went to Paris, where he discovered the poetry of Baudelaire. He was to read and recite the Frenchman's work throughout his life.
• Those... for noble reasons, failed to find a home in the ordinary world-those whom Baudelaire might have dignified with the honorific poets.
  

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