Anatomy of Restlessness by Bruce Chatwin Page B

grow up to be the gentlest people. They are happy with their lot, which they consider ideal, and anyone who talks of ‘a murderous hunting instinct innate in man’ displays his wanton ignorance.
    Why do they grow up so straight? Because they are never frustrated by tortured childhoods. The mothers never sit still for long, and their babies are never left alone until the age of three and more. They lie close to their mothers’ breasts in a leather sling, and are rocked into contentment by the gentle swaying walk. When a mother rocks her baby, she is imitating, unaware, the gentle savage as she walks through the grassy savannah, protecting her child from snakes, scorpions and the terrors of the bush. If we need movement from birth, how should we settle down later?
    Travel must he adventurous. ‘The great affair is to move,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in Travels with a Donkey, ‘to feel the needs and hitches of life more nearly; to come down off this feather bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot, and strewn with cutting flints.’ The bumps are vital. They keep the adrenalin pumping round.
    We all have adrenalin. We cannot drain it from our systems or pray it will evaporate. Deprived of danger we invent artificial enemies, psychosomatic illnesses, tax-collectors, and, worst of all, ourselves, if we are left alone in the single room. Adrenalin is our travel allowance. We might just as well use it up in a harmless way. Air travel is livening up in this respect but as a species we are terrestrial. Man walked and swam long before he rode or flew. Our human possibilities are best fulfilled on land or sea. Poor Icarus crashed.
    The best thing is to walk. We should follow the Chinese poet Li Po in ‘the hardships of travel and the many branchings of the way’. For life is a journey through a wilderness. This concept, universal to the point of banality, could not have survived unless it were biologically true. None of our revolutionary heroes is worth a thing until he has been on a good walk. Ché Guevara spoke of the ‘nomadic phase’ of the Cuban Revolution. Look what the Long March did for Mao Tse-Tung, or Exodus for Moses.
    Movement is the best cure for melancholy, as Robert Burton (the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy ) understood. ‘The heavens themselves run continually round, the sun riseth and sets, stars and planets keep their constant motions, the air is still tossed by the winds, the waters ebb and flow ... to teach us that we should ever be in motion.’ All birds and animals have biological time clocks regulated by the passage of celestial bodies. They are used as chronometers and navigation aids. Geese migrate by the stars, and some behavioural scientists have at last woken up to the fact that man is a seasonal animal. A tramp I once met best described this involuntary compulsion to wander. ‘It’s as though the tides was pulling you along the high road. I’m like the Arctic Tern. That’s a beautiful white bird, you know, what flies from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again.’
    The word ‘revolution’, so offensive to the persecutors of Galileo, was originally used to denote the cyclical passage of celestial bodies. When the geographical movements of people are tampered with, they attach themselves to political movements. When a revolutionary hijacker says, ‘I’m married to the Revolution,’ he means it. For Revolution is a liberating god, the Dionysus of our age. It is a cure for melancholy. Revolution is the Way to Freedom, even if the end result is greater servitude.
    Each spring the nomadic tribes of Asia shrug off the inertia of winter, and return with the regularity of swallows returning to their summer pastures. The women put on fresh flowered calico dresses, and literally ‘wear the spring’. They sway to the rhythm of their pitching saddles, and mark time to the insistent beat