The "Notebooks" which form the third section of the book consist of more than a hundred vignettes, quotes, and episodes-each between seventy and seven hundred words long-reflecting seventeen years of thinking and writing. Scraps of academic research, lines of poetry, epiphanies on desert tracks, fragments of ancient lore; references to Muslim pilgrims, Indian monks, Lapland legends, modern Florida, Elizabethan plays; reflections on Stone-Age humans, nomadic tribes, and ancient myths, are combined to suggest that humans are forged and defined by two things—"the beast in the dark" and "the nomadic instinct." These themes, Chatwin argues, were present in the earliest hominids; they underlie many of the tensions in modern society; they echo through our religion, our dreams, and our literature. They are part of our origin, our life, and our purpose, Early hominids were not violent cannibals. Instead, they were themselves the prey of a great leopard like cat, Dinofelis, at the mouth of whose caves they were forced to camp. Fire, weapons, and even song evolved to keep the beast at bay. The primal terrors of this predator were hardwired into our consciousness.And when the cat was no longer a threat we invented substitutes, such as the devil and nuclear extinction, to meet our need for such an enemy.
Second, Chatwin argues, hominids were made by walking, and made to be in movement. It was our ability to walk upright that allowed us to hunt, and survive—when other apes couldn't—on the flat savannah, and ultimately to cover the world. Our brains evolved to fit our stride. Homo sapiens is Homo ambulans. Babies are happiest when being carried by a walking adult. Our minds, our souls, our bodies work most efficiently, most profoundly, most happily, when moving and, in particular, walking. Modern civilization imprisons us in offices, and treats tramps, Gypsies, mystics, and nomads as misfits. But in fact these wanderers are in tune with an ancient and more natural form of human life. It is homes and cities and sedentary jobs that are unnatural. To find yourself, you must travel.
The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin, Introduction, by Rory Stewart