Alain de Botton: 'I'm not someone who can lie on a deckchair'

Alain de Botton aims to change the way we travel. Forget about that breathless search for distant thrills, and concentrate on enjoying where you are - even in a motorway café. Boyd Tonkin meets the visionary voyager

Having consoled us with philosophy and changed our lives with Proust, Alain de Botton now wants to help us think our way into happier times on our travels. Oh, bliss (so you imagine the reaction from his horde of fans): a six-pack of dreamy, creamy meditations on the glories of those sun-scorched beaches, misty rainforest glades and awesome peaks.

As it turns out, the nation's favourite mass-market metaphysician finds more succour for the spirit amid the stained laminates and leathery buns of a service station. This forsaken place smells of "frying oil and lemon-scented floor polish" – and of the lonely melancholia of humans on the move. "In some ways I wanted to write a whole book about service stations," he says, wistfully, pregnantly. "That may yet come."

The Art of Travel (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99) does make it to a Barbados beach, as well as to that mysterious Merry Muncher. Yet De Botton cares more about perceptions than destinations. "At the heart of travel is a perceptual shift," he explains. "And that perceptual shift doesn't depend on going to an exotic or a faraway place."

As you would expect, the De Botton approach to travel would deflate the likes of Monsieur Michelin. In Madrid, the finger-wagging enthusiasm of a guidebook drives him under the hotel bedclothes in terror. A De Botton guide would take another route, he thinks. "It might say, 'This afternoon, return to your hotel. Lie on the bed. Think – and despair about your life. Then go to sleep.' And it would allow for that, rather than: On to the next monument!"

Should we cancel that city break, then? Not quite yet. As with De Botton's self-help studies of the French novelist, and the European thinkers, this latest intellectual adventure sets off in pursuit of happiness. Soon, we learn that no brochure can offer this item for sale. After his Caribbean view has darkened into a cloud of anxieties, De Botton pinpoints the trouble with travel: "I had inadvertently brought myself with me."

The author and his partner ("M") bicker about next to nothing. "Squabbling with a partner on holiday is quite humbling," he says. "You think, human beings are so ridiculous. We've just had an argument about the cap of the sun-cream and yet, historically, we're incredibly privileged."

The whole book functions as a sort of gloss on a quotation from John Ruskin: "No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier or wiser." Add a zero to Ruskin's 1860s steam velocity, and the point holds. Without a change of mind as well as scene, travel only means a burst of burning fuel. "It goes to the heart of happiness, I think," De Botton says. "The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things." Your own viewpoint will fix feelings far more solidly than any vista: "If you have to rank how happiness comes about," he argues, "beauty is a worryingly weak ingredient, in terms of shifting mood."

Beside him in Penguin's offices, stacked up like in-flight meals in an aircraft galley, stand piles of his new book for the author to sign. Once mocked by graceless profile-writers as an old, domed head on far-too-young shoulders, he now looks, and sounds, pleasantly ageless: precise, not pedantic. But he does admit to a Victor Meldrew moment in the cab, where an annoying on-board TV screen symbolised the barriers that now prevent any traveller from slowing down. "You're supposed always to need distraction. You're never allowed to look out of the window, to be in your own thoughts."

I wonder whether, in this age of frantic f hyper-stimulation, travel and sex must count as our most frequently disappointing pleasures. Philosophically, De Botton corrects my "sex" to "love", but concurs: "I think they've got a lot in common in the way that the fantasy works ... What tends to go wrong is that we underestimate how complicated we are, how tricky we are."

The Art of Travel does show, with huge charm and finesse, how we can deepen the value of our voyages. Above all, it aims to take the commotion out of locomotion. What matters, for De Botton, is the ability to "eat a place": to pay it enough close, unhurried attention to absorb a personal meaning. He travels to Barbados and up the M6; to Amsterdam, Provence and Madrid; to the Lake District and home to Hammersmith, where he tries to infuse his walk to the tube with a renewed "wonder and gratitude".

This being a De Botton book, he also packs a set of reflections on itinerant artists and thinkers: Burke, Wordsworth, Ruskin, Flaubert, Hopper, Van Gogh. The Art of Travel has a semi-concealed scholarly spine: it builds into a companionable treatise on Romantic aesthetics, and will sell around 1,000 times as many copies as any work so labelled on its cover. "It became apparent to me that the history of travel and the history of Romantic aesthetics run together," he says.

Sometimes, the match of landscape and luminary seems automatic: Wordsworth in the Lakes, Vincent in Provence. Elsewhere, De Botton forges his own links. Flaubert's sojourn in Egypt – treated by radical critics such as Edward Said as a paradigm of the exploitative quest for "oriental" excitement – prompts De Botton to look for the exotic in the neat streets of Amsterdam. "There is such a thing as imperial domination and economic exploitation," he says. "But sometimes it's been too closely tied to aesthetics. Weirdly, one can find a country richer than one's own, with which one has no colonial relationship, exotic as well."

Like his previous books, The Art of Travel beguiles with its intimate and democratic voice. De Botton gently downgrades long-haul snobbery. Equally, he grants no special merit to the roughshod wanderer who might sneer, "'Look at those people over there in the air-conditioned coach. They must be the bad guys. But we're heroic because we've got rucksacks.'"

In the past, de Botton has attracted a few sneers of his own: first, for daring to be born into a wealthy Swiss financier's family, then for adopting such an endearing homely tone in his quests to cure mundane miseries through a quick dip into the Western canon.

The mockers are missing the point. In strictly biographical terms, he comes not so much from settled Swiss affluence as from the ever-mobile, ever-anxious world of Mediterranean Sephardic Jewry. His father (brought up in Alexandria) never lost that diasporic itch of insecurity. If you really insist on tying De Botton's ambitions to his ancestry, the key might be the search for portable virtue: those sources of delight and enlightenment that can stay safe inside, in spite of all upheavals and transitions.

The Art of Travel finds them in ideas that stride from Burke's theory of the "sublime" to Ruskin's principles of drawing, with the injunction "to notice rather than to look". All the same, it remains almost as much of an anti-travel tome as what Baudelaire's poem calls an "Invitation to the Voyage". So what would count as the ideal trip for the man who once said "I don't do holidays"?

De Botton gives a typically Epicurean answer: "What comes to mind is a trip to Norfolk I did recently – a completely low-key weekend. But it was perfect in all ways. I had some good thoughts about landscape and nature; I was getting on well with my partner; she was happy with me. It was undramatic, but it served its purpose, broadened horizons, took me out of myself, and showed me other things." As for his holiday from hell, he reverts to that penitential Barbados beach: "What that showed me was that I'm not someone who can lie on a deckchair. It rammed the point home: don't bother with this again."