The Nomadic Alternative – Page 263

And if the 'ways' of childhood lead through bleak acres of concrete (The Concrete Jungle is not so named for nothing), through airport lounges to a bewildering series of irrecoverable destinations, the human identity will suffer. If the mother is not present it will suffer more. No man can know who he is unless he knows where he was.

at times
My soul is sad, that I have roamed through life
Still most a stranger, most with naked heart
At mine own home and birth-place.

In Coleridge, the curse of rootlessness, the sensation of living in a "land of Strangers" and the opium habit were inseparable. The real becomes the surreal, when the firmament on which the real resides, is lost from view. One American in every five changes his home each year. And if the roots of jet-age children lie at 35,000 feet, how will they come down to earth later?

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Some readers will say I have deliberately whitewashed the hunters and gatherers and credited them with less violent behaviour than they deserve. Some do defend their territories and repel invaders with dedicated ferocity. The Kalahari Bushmen and others, it is true, run away at the approach of strangers; but readers of Theodora Kroeber's Ishe, the last 'wild' Indian in the United States, will recall her heart-rending account of the Yahi Indians of California, who defended their hunting grounds from the whites without compromise to the very last man. Elsewhere hunters have greeted invading newcomers with silent arrows.

The valiant defence of homeland might seem to offer encouragement to Social Darwinists, who see the territorial acquisitiveness of nation states - and even property speculators - as the survival in man of a basic animal drive to carve out, hold and defend a territory, until some newcomer batters down the resident proprietor. The latter