Anatomy of Restlessness by Bruce Chatwin

and future as much as the past. There have been two main inducements to wander: ECONOMIC and NEUROTIC. For example, the International Set are neurotics. They have reached satiation point at home; so they wander – from tax-haven to tax-haven with an occasional raid on the source of their wealth – their base . How often has one heard the lamentations of an American expatriate at the prospect of a visit to his trustees in Pittsburgh. The same thing happened in the Roman Empire in the third century AD and later. The rich abdicated the responsibilities of their wealth; the cities became unendurable and at the mercy of property speculators. Wealth was divorced from its sources. A strong state took over and collapsed under the strain. The rich wore their wealth, and the governments passed endless laws against extravagance in dress. Compare the diamonds and gold boxes of today, and the aura attached to portable possessions. The mobile rich were impossible to tax: the advantages of nofixed-address were obvious. So the unpredictable demands of the tax-collector were laid at the feet of those who could least afford to pay. Wandering passed from the neurotic to the economic stage.
    True nomads watch the passing of civilisations with equanimity; so does China, that unique combination of Civilisation and Barbarism. There is a good Egyptian text to illustrate the patronising attitude of the super-civilised in his self-confident days. ‘The miserable Asiatic ... he does not live in one place but his feet wander ... he conquers not, neither is he conquered. He may plunder a lonely settlement but he will never take a populous city.’ Civilisations destroy themselves; nomads have never (to my certain knowledge) destroyed one, though they are never far away at the kill, and may topple a disintegrating structure. The civilised alone have control of their destiny, and I do not believe in any of the cyclical theories of decline, fall and rebirth.
    Â 
    Now for today. We may have enough food even, but we certainly do not have enough room. Marshall McLuhan asks us to accept that literacy, the linch-pin of Civilisation is OUT; that electronic technology is by-passing the ‘rational processes of learning’ and that jobs and specialists are things of the past. ‘The World has become a Global Village,’ he says. Or is it Mobile Encampment? ‘The expert is the man who stays put .’ Literature, he says will disappear, and the social barriers are coming down; everyone is free for the higher exercises of the mind (or spirit?). One thing is certain – the Paterfamilias, that bastion of Civilisation (not the matriarch) is right OUT. McLuhan is correct in much of his analysis of the effects of the new media. He does not seem to appreciate their probable long-term consequences. They are likely to be rather less than comfortable. The old nostalgic dream of a free classless society may indeed now be possible. But there are too many of us and there would have to be a drastic drop in population. Much of the world’s population is on the move as never before, tourists, businessmen, itinerant labour, drop-outs, political activists, etc: like the nomads who first sat on a horse, we have again the means for total mobility. As anyone who owns a house knows, it is often cheaper to move than to stay. But this new Internationalism has activated a new parochialism. Separatism is rampant. Minorities feel threatened; small exclusive groups splinter off. They £ 50 travel allowance was not imposed for purely economic reasons.
    Are these two trends not representative of the two basic human characteristics I mentioned earlier?
    Yours ever,
Bruce Chatwin

IT’S A NOMAD NOMAD WORLD
    In one of his gloomier moments Pascal said that all man’s unhappiness stemmed from a single cause, his inability to remain quietly in a room. ‘Notre nature,’ he wrote, ‘est dans le mouvement ... La seule chose qui nous console