SONGLINES - BRUCE CHATWIN

A wonderful failure of a book and exactly what I needed to read right now. The book is nominally a sort of travelogue/investigation of Australia and the Aboriginal culture that he’s fascinated with. What makes the book a failure is that it seems to be the remains of a much longer book about nomadism and humanity in general. I know because one of my best friends has an English Masters and wrote his thesis on Chatwin that he (Chatwin) spent much of his life obsessing over nomads, visiting them around the world, living as a sort of nomad himself. The book could certainly be knocked for not knowing very much about Aboriginal culture and Songlines themselves, which are fascinating and I’d love to hear more about from a more academic/indigenous source. It is clear though that Chatwin takes them seriously in a way that other YTs don’t. The way he ruminates on their meaning and their use and the way they represent a vast human project, like a pyramid built with just words and songs, is interesting and admirable and it’s always important to remember that the greatest and most monumental human accomplishments aren’t the largest/oldest buildings. But the book isn’t really about that, by the middle he’s breaking off into his larger theories about human settlement. He does one of my favorite things and just lists quotes about the human need for movement and the despotism of settlement. I feel this urge and this shit is pretty close to my heart. The idea of ethical nomadism or what it means to live an unfixed life is something I think about all the time. I love the way he was able to cannibalize what must have been this huge labor of love, a lifetime’s work, that turned out to be unreadable and then, instead of freezing with despair, condensed it into this perfect little ode to movement. Shout out to Nick to putting me on to this. Endless Songlines.