The Nomadic Alternative – Page 3

reaches a peak of inflammation at predictable hours…

The symptoms include a chronic inability to remain in one place.

“One is for ever in and out of one’s cell”, Cassian continued,

“gazing at the sun as though it were setting late.” The victim

cannot concentrate on his work. He cannot read, but paces round

his room arranging and rearranging his loved and hated possessions

with neurotic precision. Any rhythmic activity, be it dancing or

scratching his scalp, pacifies, if only for a moment, the ‘wanderer

in his soul’. Pinned to one place he verbalizes or enacts his sexual

fantasies. (The Marquis de Sade is pre-eminently the product of

confinement.) Violent solutions to complicated problems attract him;

for diabolic energy is less insupportable than torpor. Or he

retreats along the paths of inner itineraries to rediscover Eden

in a world of artificial paradises.

Tethered by illness and tortured by pain, Pascal analysed the

disease with surgical precision. Unfulfilled longings of an illusory

freedom goaded men through a bleak valley of anguish to discover,

at the end of the road, their weakness, ignorance and dependence.

“Our nature lies in movement;” he wrote, “inertia is death.”

I had imagined that all men’s unhappiness stemmed from a single

cause, his inability to remain quietly in a room… But then

I reflected further, and, after, discovering the cause of all

our misfortunes I tried to explain the reason for them. And I

found one very good reason, the natural unhappiness of our weak

mortal condition, so unhappy that when we give to it all our

attention, nothing can console us… One thing alone can alle-

viate our despair, and that is distraction. Yet this is the

greatest of all our misfortunes; for in distraction we are

prevented from thinking about ourselves, and are gradually led

to ruin. (Pensées)

Ours is the age of the heart transplant and biological warfare,

spiralling technology and discontent, journeys into space and the

back of the mind, scars on the earth and the bodies of its inhabi-

tants, and the Judgement Day of our own creation. We seem to hover,

anxiously before taking the suicidal plunge “au fond de l’Inconnu

pour trouver du nouveau!”^*

^*“to the pit of the Unknown in search of something new”, the last

line of Baudelaire’s Le Voyage