💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › isabell-eberhardt-on-vagrancy.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 10:53:42. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: On Vagrancy Author: Isabell Eberhardt Date: unknown Language: en Topics: egoist, simple living, subjectivity, vagrancy Source: Retrieved on February 2, 2011 from http://spunk.org/library/writers/eberhard/sp000201.txt Notes: 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. Isabell Eberhardt, 1877–1904.
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.