The architecture of happiness

I am so glad I brought Alain de Botton's book with me on this trip.

While I was walking up and down the towns of St Gallen, Zurich, Bellinzona, Locarno and Basel, admiring their architectures of churches, town halls, museums or just simply some random residential buildings (the vibrant colours in Locarno! the warm wooden houses in St Gallen!), this passage found its way into my head - "So eloquent are materials and colours, then, that a facade can be made to speak of how a country should be ruled and which principles ought to govern its foreign policy. Political and ethical ideas can be written into window frames and door handles. An abstract glass box on a stone plinth can deliver a paean to tranquillity and civilisation."

In Kunstmuseum this afternoon, upon seeing a painting or two that touched me, a sudden sense of void and sadness overcame me. On my train journey back to the hotel, I read this: "Our sadness won't be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain."

And then some more: "While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies...Endeavouring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love."

This is a perfect alternative travel guidebook.