The Cult of the Wanderer

from Isabelle Eberhardt  - “The Oblivion Seekers” tr. Paul Bowles

"In our modern society the nomad is a pariah ‘without known domicile or residence’. By adding these few words to the name of anyone whose appearance they consider irregular, those who make and enforce the law 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 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 into it and following it obediently across mountains and valleys! ...
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."



Eberhardt, the illegitmate Swiss daughter of a Russian aristocrat, converted to Sufism and became a hardcore vagabond and adventuress in North Africa. She drowned in a flash flood in 1904 in Ain Sefra, Algeria, after escaping from a Foreign Legion hospital where she was convalescing from malaria.