Tierra del Fuego was the last place man had wandered to on foot. There is some way in which Patagonia is the ultimate symbol of restlessness for the human condition.

I am exasperated without having begun. One’s independence is so fragile a thing.

The best travelers are illiterate. Narratives of travel are pale compensations for the journey itself, and merely proclaim the traveler’s inadequacy as a traveler. The best travelers do not pause to record their second-rate impressions, to be read third hand. Their experience is primal; their minds are uncongealed by the written word.

I know myself too well. Once in Morocco the footsteps lead to another horizon. I am a bum and I do not believe in work of any kind.

They [Nemadi Tribe] are the greatest storytellers and they make a virtue of their sudden departures for the unknown.

I feel I have achieved virtually nothing on this journey. No sense of a path traveled, just an aimless flailing around, a pointless, dispiriting succession of visits to Kabul punctuated by occasional relief journeys into the hinterland. The peaks beyond seem far more exciting. Search for a paradise which is elusive.

I’ve always been interested in the marvelous.

Change is the only thing worth living for. Never sit your life out at a desk. Ulcers and heart condition follow.

My subsequent travels, imaginary or real, are of course relatively unimportant. But I would say at the outset that I value my ambivalence highly. I avoid head-on collisions, and attack surreptitiously or just walk out. I accumulate things rapidly and with financial success, then suddenly dispose of them in an ill-tempered and impulsive way. I have never felt any real attachment to a home and fail to produce the normal emotive response when the word is mentioned—except when traveling. . . .

This book is written in answer to a need to explain my own restlessness—coupled with a morbid preoccupation with roots.

Everyone needs a quest as an excuse for living.

It is [R.L.] Stevenson’s second-ratedness that makes him interesting. His predicament is very familiar — the spoilt child of worthy, narrow-minded parents, unwilling to follow in the family business, longing to slough off civilization in favor of healthy primitivism, yet tied to home by links of affection and cash, Stevenson is the forerunner of countless middle-class children who litter the world’s beaches, or comfort themselves with anachronistic pursuits and worn-out religions. Travels With a Donkey is the prototype of the incompetent undergraduate voyage.

As I wrote in my notebooks, the mystics believe the ideal man shall walk himself to a ‘right death”. He who has arrived “goes back”.

“Travel”: same words as “travail” — “bodily or mental labor”, “toil, especially of a painful or oppressive nature”, “exertion”, “hardship”, “suffering”. A “journey”.

By spending his whole life walking and singing his Ancestors’ Songline, a [aboriginal] man eventually became the track, the Ancestor and the song.

In Islam, and especially among the Sufi Orders, siyahat or “errance” — the action or rhythm of walking — was used as a technique for dissolving the attachments of the world and allowing men to lose themselves in God. The aim of a dervish was to become a “dead man walking”: one whose body stays alive on the earth yet whose soul is already in Heaven. A Sufi manual, the Kashf-al-Mahjub, says that, towards the end of his journey, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveler following his own free will.

Yet in the East, they still preserve the once universal concept: that wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.

In the “Descent of Man” Darwin notes that in certain birds the migratory impulse is stronger than the maternal. A mother will abandon her fledglings in the nest rather than miss her appointment for the long journey south.

All the Great Teachers have preached that Man, originally, was a “wanderer in the scorching and barren wilderness of this world” — the words are those of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor — and to rediscover his humanity, he must slough off attachments and take to the road.

Could it be, I wondered, that our need for distraction, our mania for the new, was, in essence, an instinctive migratory urge akin to that of birds in autumn?

Why, he [Pascal] asked must a man with sufficient to live on feel drawn to divert himself on long sea voyages? To dwell in another town? To go off in search of a peppercorn? Or go off to war and break skulls?

“I believe something similar about the desert,” I said. Man was born in the desert, in Africa. By returning to the desert he rediscovers himself.

Yet the form of ascetism he [Thesiger] has practised over fity years puts him in the class of other travelers — the Desert Fathers, the Irish Pilgrims, the Fakirs, the Holy Wanderers of India, or marvelous intellects like the poet Li Po who traveled to discover the ‘great calm’ that is perhaps the same as the Peace of God.

There is a case for supposing that all the transcendental religions are strategems for people whose lives were wrecked by settlement.

Mr. Thesiger is not a nomad but a traveler, in whom the old sense of travel as ‘travail’ has been revived.

Moses took his people back into the clean air of the desert and lived in a black tent, and when he died, he walked out of the camp and the vultures got him in a valley in Beth-Peor — ‘and no man knoweth his tomb.’

Travel must be 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 civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot, and strewn with cutting flints.” The bumps are vital. They keep the adrenalin pumping round.

We are travelers from birth.

Evolution intended us to be travelers. Settlement for any length of time, in cave or castle, has at best been a sporadic condition in the history of man.

I prefer the cosmopolitan scepticism of Montaigne. He saw travel as a profitable exercise; the minds 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.

But travel does not merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind.

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.

In times of despair the ‘Nomadic Alternative’ was too tempting to resist.

A nomad does not ‘wander aimlessly from place to place’ as one dictionary would have it. The word derives from Latin and Greek meaning ‘to pasture.’

Diogenes’ deprecation of city life is an early example of ‘cultural primitivism’ or the discontent of the civilized with civilization. It is an emotional rather than a rational impulse that has always led men to abandon civilization and seek a simpler life, a life in harmony with ‘nature’ unhampered with possessions, free from the grinding bonds of technology, sinless, promiscuous, anarchic, and sometimes vegetarian.

There have been two main inducements to wander: economic and neurotic.

The nomad renounces; he reflects in his solitude; he abandons collective rituals, and cares little for the rational process of learning or literacy. He is a man of faith.

The longings of civilized men for a natural life identified with that of the nomads or other “primitive” peoples. To be called “Nostalgia for Paradise,” the belief that all those who have successfully resisted or remained unaffected by civilization have a secret to happiness that the civilized world has lost.

True pastoral nomadism, with herds on the move and no agricultures, was not a stage towards Civilization. It developed as an alternative to it.

1. Wandering is a human characteristic genetically inherited from the vegetarian primates.

2. All human beings have the emotional, if not an actual biological, need for a base, cave, den, tribal territory, possessions or port. This is something we share with the carnivores.

Escapism . . . . What is this neurotic restlessness, the gadfly that tormented the Greeks? Wandering may settle some of my natural curiosity and my urge to explore, but then I am tugged back by a longing for home. I have a compulsion to wander and a compulsion to return . . . . True nomads have no fixed home as such.

Hunters and herdsmen shift for economic reasons. Less obvious are the reasons for the nomads’ intransigence in face of settlement even when the economic inducements are overwhelmingly in its favor.

Greek legend of Io and her compulsive wandering.

Cain “wandered over the surface of the earth.”

The question I will try to answer is “Why do men wander rather than sit still? ” I have proposed one title — The Nomadic Alternative.

Jahwah gave the land to his Children to wander through, not to settle or sink roots there.

The argument, roughly, was as follows: that in becoming human, man had acquired, together with his straight legs and striding walk, a migratory “drive” or instinct to walk long distances through the seasons; that this “drive” was inseparable from his central nervous systen; and that when warped in conditions of settlement, it founds outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or mania for the new.