The Nomadic Alternative – Page 44

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to promote personal immortality and freedom from wandering in the next. The wanderer uses his own legs to walk along the road to Eden. If he walks strenuously enough, he arrives before time. He is thus 'twice born' and experiences the joy of resurrection before the dissolution of the body. Furthermore the Road is a place of harmony and equality, while settlers pile up hierarchies of possessions and power. Settlement is a perversion. Confinement is Hell. "And the den nam'd Horror held a man chain'd hand and foot." Thus William Blake imagined the prisoners of the Bastille mesmerized with terror and the Governor stalking "like a mad lion".

The traveller along the Road, like the hero of Pilgrim's Progress, faces a choice of forking paths. The Easy Way leads to an appointment with retribution, anxiety and stress. The Hard or Energetic Way spirals upward to a place of release from the dangers of life. It shuns and skirts as it goes the ravines, caves and gorges (Compare - Combe Capelle, The Cave of Pekin Man and Olduvai Gorge.) which abound with predatory monsters, ready to sink their fangs into the slothful. There are pits for the unwary traveller, but there are also friendly helpers - angels or beast slayers - to help him on his way. Possessions must not drag him down. He must 'take no heed for the morrow', for the dangers of tomorrow are never predictable. To the end the Beast stalks the traveller and gives no warning of his attack. Life is always a matter of chance.

In muscular prose, that awful New England firebrand, Cotton Mather, stirringly charts the axis of migration in his Wonders of the Invisible World:

The Wilderness through which we are passing to the Promised Land is all filled with fiery flying serpents. But, blessed be God, none of them have hitherto so fastened upon us as to confound us utterly. Our way to Heaven lies by Dens of Lions and Mounts of Leopards; there are incredible droves of Devils in our way... We are poor travellers in a world which is as well the Devil's Field as the Devil's Goal; a world in which every nook whereof, the Devil is encamped with bands of Robbers to pester all that have their faces looking Zionward.