“We Should Ever Be In Motion”

Bruce Chatwin was a travel writer who died in 1989. His words still deserve attention. Below are two excerpts I have taken from his book Anatomy of Restlessness. This is my scientific rationale for dropping out of school (yah Kanye!) and being in the habit of buying one-way plane tickets.

“…In becoming human, man has acquired, together with his straight legs and striding walk, a migratory ‘drive’ or instinct to walk long distances through the seasons; that this ‘drive’ is inseparable from his central nervous system; and that, when warped in conditions of settlement, it found outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new. This would explain why mobile societies such as the gypsies are egalitarian, thing-free, and resistant to change; also why, to reestablish the harmony of the First State, all the great teachers – Buddha, Laozi, St. Francis – had set the perpetual pilgrimage at the heart of their message and told their disciples, literally, to follow The Way.” Pg. 12



“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 de nos miseres est le divertissement.’ Diversion. Distraction. Fantasy. Change of fashion, food, love and landscape. We need them as we need the air we breathe. Without change our brains and bodies rot. The man who sits quietly in a shuttered room is likely to be mad, tortured by hallucinations and introspection.

Some American brain specialists took encephalograph readings of travelers. They found that changes of scenery and awareness of the passage of seasons through the year stimulated the rhythms of the brain, contributing to a sense of well-being and an active purpose in life. Monotonous surroundings and tedious regular activities wove patterns which produced fatigue, nervous disorders, apathy, self-disgust and violent reactions. Hardly surprising, then, that a generation cushioned from the cold by central heating, from the heat by air-conditioning, carted in aseptic transports from one identical house or hotel to another, should feel the need for journeys of the mind or body, for pep pills or tranquilizers, or for the cathartic journeys of sex, music, and dance. We spend far too much time in shuttered rooms.

I prefer the cosmopolitan skepticism of Montaigne. He saw travel as a ‘profitable exercise; the mind is constantly stimulated by observing new and unknown things…No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, however much opposed to my own…The savages who roast and eat the bodies of their dead do not scandalize me so much as those who persecute the living.’ Custom, he said, and set attitudes of mind, dulled the senses and hid the true nature of things. Man is naturally curious.

…Travel does not merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind.” Pg. 100