The Nomadic Alternative – Page 81

"Under a tree each man lives; as soon as it is winter he covers the tree with a white waterproof felt, but in the summer heat they live without the felt." (IV,23)

The householder compulsively improves and adorns his house. He stuffs it with things and the things become the stuffing of his life. When its indigestible interior palls or its site no longer matches the social ambitions of its owner, he rehouses himself. A house possesses its proprietor, but a tent follows him. The life of a nomad is a perpetual bivouac, and he sees in his impermanent home the symbol of his openness to the world, in the campfires a nightly reaffirmation of tribal solidarity. The nomad acclimatizes himself to extremes of heat and cold. He can only breathe the free air of wide windy places. The air of the city is not air but poison gas, and as he passes by, he filters its odious fumes through the end of his turban for fear of contagion.

But the walls and roof of a house divorce men from their natural habitat, raising barricades against the wildness of the weather, animals and other men. Each house is a safe-deposit for the hoarded surplus of its owner, and the outsider imagines the piles of treasure to increase in proportion to the height of its walls and the strength of its locks. Walls invite insurgents to scale them, and a house may become its owner's shroud and pyre. But there are no locks and keys to a tent, no walls to collapse and smother the owner. The nomad reduces his things to those he can carry and those which will not attract the eye of envy. Under the folds of a tent everything lies open to view. The shimmering 'Holy of Holies' in a Christian Church and the austere void of a courtyard mosque reflect this difference of temperaments.

The extent to which the tent has entered into religious symbolism is hardly surprising. The domed Mongol yurt reflected the vault of heaven, its main seam the Milky Way and its smoke hole the Cosmic Axis. The Heaven of Jehovah was simply a celestial tent, and, if a nomad feels insecure under a roof, the God of the Way never greatly cared for the idea of the Temple. He sneered at its immobility and