written when I was a young, fiery activist, dedicated to bringing down global capitalism and ushering in a regime of worldwide economic justice—it turned out to be a little misleading in the end. It was supposed to be a travelogue, a series of visits to the heartlands of resistance to economic globalization. But I kept moving the goalposts, widening my search so that I had an excuse to spend time with people like the Papuans, or landless Brazilian farmers, or Indigenous people in southern Mexico. The middle-class Europeans blockading summits and waffling about Negri and Fanon bored me to tears. They were rootless; they were as lost as me. They came in by plane or train from some other European city, they put on their black masks and Palestinian scarves, shouted at some fat cats, got tear-gassed and then went home. Empty gestures, empty words, and I was empty too. But in the Baliem Valley in Papua or the Lacandon jungle in Mexico I found something else; something older, deeper, calmer and very much more real. I found people who belonged to a place. I had never seen this before. Where I grew up, there was nothing like it. It had—it still has—more meaning to me than any other way of human living I had seen. I wanted to know: what would that be like? And could I have it?
8.
My family is from the lower middle class, the most derided class in England. Not callus-handed and romantically oppressed like the working class. Not classy or rich like the gentry or the aristos. Not possessed of degrees or home libraries or big wine glasses like the haute bourgeoisie. Not exotic and in need of stout liberal defence like the migrants. We are the class snickered at in Roald Dahl books. We come from suburbs and have family cars and watch the telly in the lounge and live in medium-sized towns in unfashionable places and have never been to the theatre and regard the Daily Mail as a good newspaper. I’m not speaking personally. I don’t regard the Daily Mail as a good newspaper, though I do think it has quite a fetching logo.
And anyway, I escaped. My great grandparents were policemen, housewives, snipers on the Somme, union men, Methodists, proper old inter-war socialists in cardigans who lived in tiny terraces with outside loos and never touched a drop. My grandparents were shopkeepers, postmen, train and bus drivers, immigrant workers in camera factories, members of reserved trades, weekend coarse fishermen, allotment gardeners, rosette-winning attenders of dog shows. My dad left school at 16, became an engineer’s apprentice, and set out to prove his own dad wrong. My mum met him at school, left at the same age, became a comptometer operator (look it up), then a school classroom assistant, a housewife, our mum, the still point in a not-often-still home.
Me? I’m an Oxford University graduate who writes books for a living. Look! I’ve worked in the jungles of Borneo and the villages of Mexico. I’ve done book tours of Australia and the USA. I don’t have any money, but I have—no, I had—my father’s ambition and I know how to look like I’m one of them. You know: one of the kinds of people who also have all these things but who somehow, unlike me, feel they have them by right. Who grew into them, or who always had them, or who grew up surrounded by people who did. At Oxford I would see these 19-year-old boys in tweed jackets, who wandered about full of louche, angular confidence, and they didn’t seem any smarter than me but they seemed a lot more sure of themselves. I knew nothing about the world, or myself, or how to behave, and I didn’t know what I was doing there, or anywhere else. But they did. They were all confident, while I was not. At least I thought they were. Now that I write this, I realize I’m not so sure. Maybe they were looking at me the same way. Where did this chip on my shoulder fall from? I think my dad must have dropped it as he was passing. It’s not attractive. I wonder if I will pass it on to my children. I am trying not to.
This is me: a wanderer through words and through the world. A wanderer who is often sick of wandering, who is not a natural at this, who wants to put down roots, or feels he would be a better and more whole and more productive member of society if he did, and who was brought up that way. At the same time I am someone whose soul drifts like a cloudbank, someone who feels sick at the very notion of being productive, someone who wants to be anything but a member of society, thinks society stinks and has nothing to do with him. There is the battle, maybe within us all. The West battles the East, the old battles the new, modernity battles tradition, inside all of us, all of the time. It’s exhausting, don’t you find?
This is the battle I have used my words to document for so many years. Now, suddenly, something is happening that I never expected or prepared for. All the words are dropping away.
9.
Three years ago, I arrived here, in my new green stillness, in a land that had been stripped bare for centuries by people from my land, and I started to fragment. I felt like I was falling apart. After the first few weeks, the initial anxiety dissipated, but I still felt the scales dropping off my skin one by one. All of my comfortable certainties looked less comfortable. Surrounded now by people of different origins, classes, ages, backgrounds, I saw more clearly than ever that for most of my adult life I had been hanging about with people like myself: middle-class graduates, liberal-leftish, urban, left-brained, intellectual, floating, disconnected. That stuff wouldn’t wash here. Suddenly it all seemed painfully self-conscious and individualist, and so did I. In the city, in the town even, there was no real need to talk to your neighbors if you didn’t want to. I had never really learned how to do it properly; I was not good at talking to people at the best of times, which was probably another reason I had become a writer. But out here, everybody knew your business, especially if you were a blow-in like me. You had to talk to your neighbors, and they felt like neighbors, not just people who happened to be living in the next house along for now, before they moved on to something and somewhere better.
The position I had painfully staked out in the world began to fragment. I began to fragment. I am still fragmenting, I think. Sometimes it scares me, sometimes it excites me. You have to come apart to be put back together in a different shape. You have to be reformed, or you rust up, and all your parts stop moving.
Soon enough, my writing began to fragment too, because the kind of words you create to speak to the urban crowds of the alienated West don’t come from places like this. This old land out in the west, this ground will not give you what you need in that regard. It has no intention of helping. I mean that. I think, more and more, that words come from places, that they seep up into you and that places like this will not give words to people like me that speak to the things I used to be and used to believe. The words that come from this place, that bubble up from it, don’t even always make sense to me. I don’t know what they are trying to say or what they want. But they want something, and it is not what I once thought I came here to do. All I know right now is that my words don’t work the way they used to. I used to think words were my tools. Now I think it might be the other way around.
I wonder what they want me to make.
What does a writer do when his words stop working? I don’t know. All I know is that I am churning inside and everything I knew is windskipping like brown willow leaves in a winter gale. I am afraid and sometimes I am excited. I feel like something is waiting for me, and I don’t know what, but I fear that I do know. I fear that I am being called, and I am taking too long to answer. But who is to say how long it should take?
I don’t know. I don’t know much at the moment. It feels like all the things I was so sure about have dissolved away from me. I don’t even know who I am now. When I came here, I thought I would at least know where I am, but that, too, the longer I look at it, turns out not to be quite true either. The more I look at anything, the more questions I seem to have about it. All the stories I had are dissolving away. None of the scaffolding holds.
All the words I used to have: once they would have closed these paragraphs comfortably on the page. Almost without me thinking about it, they would have offered up a well-wrought conclusion, a rallying cry. They would have rounded-off, tied up, concluded. Words used to hold up my world, to construct it, to protect me from it. Now they are transparent and suddenly fragile. Now, they offer me no comfort at all. Now, they say: giving comfort is not what we do. Not anymore. Now we do something
