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Title: On Vagrancy.
Author: Isabell Eberhardt, 1877-1904.
Date: unknown.
Description: Isabell Eberhardt's father was an anarchist,
and he brought her up as an anarchist. She
lived the life of a drifter and vagabond and
died before she was 30 of illness. She left
behind some inspired writings.
Keywords: vagrancy, vagrant, vagabond, Eberhardt
Related Material: A slightly different version of this essay
was published as "Pencilled Notes" in _The
Oblivion Seekers, and other writings_
translated by Paul Bowles. San Francisco:
City Lights, 1975. ISBN 0-087286-082-5.
On Vagrancy
A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought
is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet
vagrancy is deliverance, and life on the open road is the
essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains
with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that
it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic
stick and bundle and get out!
To the one who understands the value and the delectable
flavor of solitary freedom (for no one is free who is not
alone) leaving is the bravest and finest act of all.
An egotistical happiness, possibly. But for him who
relishes the flavor, happiness.
To be alone, to be poor in needs, to be ignored, to be an
outsider who is at home everywhere, and to walk, great and by
oneself, toward the conquest of the world.
The healthy wayfarer sitting beside the road scanning the
horizon open before him, is he not the absolute master of the
earth, the waters, and even the sky? What housedweller can
vie with him in power and wealth? His estate has no limits,
his empire no law. No work bends him toward the ground, for
the bounty and beauty of the earth are already his.
In our modern society the nomad is a pariah "of no fixed
address." By adding these few words to the name of anyone
whose appearance they consider irregular, those who make and
enforce the laws can decide a man's fate.
To have a home, a family, a property or a public
function, to have a definite means of livelihood and to be a
useful cog in the social machine, all these things seem
necessary, even indispensable, to the vast majority of men,
including intellectuals, and including even those who think of
themselves as wholly liberated. And yet such things are only
a different form of the slavery that comes of contact with
others, especially regulated and continued contact.
I have always listened with admiration, if not envy, to
the declarations of citizens who tell how they have lived for
twenty or thirty years in the same section of town, or even in
the same house, and who have never been out of their native
city.
Not to feel the torturing need to know and see for
oneself what is there, beyond the mysterious blue wall of the
horizon, not to find the arrangements of life monotonous and
depressing, to look at the white road leading off into the
unknown distance without feeling the imperious necessity of
giving in to it and following it obediently across mountains
and valleys! The cowardly belief that a man must stay in one
place is too reminiscent of the unquestioning resignation of
animals, beasts of burden stupefied by servitude and yet
always willing to accept the slipping on of the harness.
There are limits to every domain, and laws to govern
every organized power. But the vagrant owns the whole vast
earth that ends only at the nonexistent horizon, and his
empire is an intangible one, for his domination and enjoyment
of it are things of the spirit.
-Isabell Eberhardt, 1877-1904.