The nomadic way of life
Freya Stark in her book 'Riding to the Tigris' (1959) reflects romantically on the nomad way of life:
It is easy for the peasant, and for all of us who live in civilisation and think to make the world more habitable, to point out that the nomad does very little. He leaves things as he finds them, destroying them in a small way if it suits him. He does not spend his life as we do in altering the accidents that happen to us so to make them more bearable - but he accepts them with gaiety and endures them with fortitude, and this is his triumph and charm. We may think reasonably enough that we dominate circumstances more then he does, since we adapt them to our needs but he has discovered that the meaning of life is more important than its circumstance - and this freedom of the soul, in which all things that happen come and go, makes him splendid - him and his gaunt women and dogs and horses, on the edge of starvation in the rain and the sun. His life does not allow him to forget the greater size of the world; and no amount of civilisation is worth the loss of this fundamental sense of proportion between the universe and man.
The nomadic way of life
Freya Stark in her book 'Riding to the Tigris' (1959) reflects romantically on the nomad way of life:
It is easy for the peasant, and for all of us who live in civilisation and think to make the world more habitable, to point out that the nomad does very little. He leaves things as he finds them, destroying them in a small way if it suits him. He does not spend his life as we do in altering the accidents that happen to us so to make them more bearable - but he accepts them with gaiety and endures them with fortitude, and this is his triumph and charm. We may think reasonably enough that we dominate circumstances more then he does, since we adapt them to our needs but he has discovered that the meaning of life is more important than its circumstance - and this freedom of the soul, in which all things that happen come and go, makes him splendid - him and his gaunt women and dogs and horses, on the edge of starvation in the rain and the sun. His life does not allow him to forget the greater size of the world; and no amount of civilisation is worth the loss of this fundamental sense of proportion between the universe and man.