The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin

The Songlines struck me, on first reading it, almost as a sacred text around which I could arrange my life and meaning. A decade later, I wrote in a notebook three days' walk east of Herat: "Most of human history was conducted through contacts, made at walking pace ... the pilgrimages to Compostela in Spain ... to the source of the Ganges, and wandering dervishes, sadhus, and friars, who approached God on foot. The Buddha meditated by walking, and Wordsworth composed sonnets while striding beside the Lakes. Bruce Chatwin concluded from all these things that we would think and live better, and be closer to our purpose as humans, if we moved continually on foot across the surface of the earth."

The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin, Introduction, by Rory Stewart

The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin

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

The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin

ARKADY ORDERED a couple of cappuccinos in the coffee-shop. We took them to a table by the window and he began to talk. I was dazzled by the speed of his mind, although at times I felt he sounded like a man on a public platform, and that much of what he said had been said before. The Aboriginals had an earthbound philosophy. The earth gave life to a man; gave him his food, language and intelligence; and the earth took him back when he died. A man's 'own country', even an empty stretch of spinifex, was itself a sacred ikon that must remain unscarred. 'Unscarred, you mean, by roads or mines or railways?' 'To wound the earth', he answered earnestly, 'is to wound yourself, and if others wound the earth, they are wounding you. The land should be left untouched: as it was in the Dreamtime when the Ancestors sang the world into existence.' 'Rilke'', I said, 'had a similar intuition. He also said song was existence.''I know,' said Arkady, resting his chin on his hands. '"Third Sonnet to Orpheus."

The Song lines, Bruce Chatwin, Chapter 3, page 11