Isabelle Eberhardt: The Oblivion Seekers

It's one of Sue's favorite books, and I can see why. It pretty much sums up Sue's (and to a greater extent, my) philosophy on life. I don't want to own property. I want to rent so I can pick up and leave when I want to. I don't want to cut grass on a beautiful Saturday, and I don't want to be financially responsible for fixing the toilet. I've done all this in another life, and looking back, I hated it. It never was me. It was just me doing the stuff I thought I was supposed to do, because everyone else was doing them.

It's true: I really want to live out in the middle of the desert with a (loaded) shotgun by the door, with Sue, my dog, a guitar, some books...

When I finally cracked the book, it took me about two nights to read it.

Isabelle Eberhardt traveled mostly through North Africa alone, among the tribes and the French soldiers there.

Here is the essence of her life's philosophy, from Penciled Notes:

A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that is was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle and get out! To the one who understands the value and the delectable flavor for solitary freedom (for no one is free who is not alone) leaving is the bravest and finest act of all.

Later, she writes:

The healthy wayfarer sitting beside the road scanning the horizon open before him, is he not the absolute master of the earth, the waters, and even the sky? What housedweller can vie with him in power and wealth? His estate has no limits, his empire no law. No work bends him toward the ground, for the bounty and beauty of the earth are already his.

And finally:

To have a home, a family, a property or a public function, to have a definite means of livelihood and to be a useful cog in the social machine, all these things seem necessary, even indispensable to the vast majority of men, including intellectuals, and including even those who think of themselves as totally liberated. And yet such things are only a different form of slavery that comes of contact with others, especially regulated and continued contact.