McClure's Magazine/Volume 59/Number 6/Traveling Light

by Algernon Blackwood

Since early childhood it has always been my instinct to “travel light”⁠—not to be choked and worried by possessions. By possessions I mean exactly what I say: a house or apartment, books, pictures, automobile, horses, property, et cetera, above all, those domestic possessions involved in the term “marriage.” I am fond of children, but I have never wanted children of my own; love may or may not have come to me, but I have never wanted to “own,” or be owned by, a woman for life.

There, I believe, in that last little phrase, is the key of what I mean⁠—the fundamental principle of this attitude to life that has always been in me: namely, I somehow knew instinctively that he who has possessions is usually owned by them.

This instinct to reduce life to its simplest terms showed itself in me very young. It was deeper, I think, than the gipsy, vagabond instinct, which made me love to get away by myself, or with one companion to wander off into lonely woods and wild places, to cook my food, make a tire, hear trees rustle in a wind that touched no walls or roofs, to watch the sun set behind a deserted moorland, or see the stars rise over hills where human footsteps never came. This wandering, gipsy instinct was strong, but it was not, I think, the root of thc matter in me.

The root of the matter, the fundamental thing in this attitude of mine, was the deep feeling to travel light, to remain unencumbered, to avoid the fuss and entanglements due to owning things, to escape the choking, smothering, suffocating weariness of having a lot of things I did not need. I wanted, no doubt, another boy’s knife or box of matches, but I remember distinctly that I never envied his parents their bigger house than our own, their horses, carriages⁠—above all, their servants and the endless bother of their larger gardens.

And this instinct to do without, to avoid accumulation of unnecessary things, is stronger in me now, at the age of fifty-six, than it was in early boyhood. If I came into ten thousand dollars a year tomorrow, I should not change my mode of life, nor want more than a larger sitting-room, nor wish for a personal servant, nor buy an automobile, nor start a library. I now have a bedroom in London and a bedroom in the country, a dozen books, a trunk of country clothes and a trunk of town clothes. Once or twice a scar I go carefully through what I have accumulated (things will accumulate somehow!) and see what I can get rid of. If I had a large income tomorrow, I should do the same.

The desire to acquire, to possess, is, like hunger and self-preservation, primitive in men. In earliest infancy it declares itself. A baby with a ball craves the ball the other baby plays with, then, having got it, throws it away. Now, let me repeat, by possessions I mean unnecessary possessions⁠—property, properties, things, more than one needs. As a living organism with a body, I find myself stuck fast to the surface of a huge globe that rolls and turns through space. I did not ask to be planted on it; I cannot escape. That body has to be fed, clothed, sheltered. Its needs are actually not great. There may be, there is, room for interpretation of the word “needs,” and one body may and does desire more, in terms of food, clothing, shelter, than another.

What was clear to me, even as a youngster, was that I personally needed very little⁠—the least I could do with. It, further, soon became clear to me that “needs” was a term that could easily become a Djin, a Frankenstein, with an insatiable appetite. With many it often grows into a monster that eats up life itself, so that its victim lives the life of his possessions, not his own life. Needs have to be watched, kept simple, for they grow in like mushrooms, and a new “need,” once indulged, soon becomes a habit that seems indispensable to comfort.

This dominating instinct to acquire and possess, then to realize that the thing acquired has little value is the tune we all dance to like frenzied marionettes. A few needs, indeed, are necessary, essential; beyond that point⁠—naturally hard to determine⁠—acquisition is futile childishness. An excess of possessions involves worry, anxiety, care and absurd expense. We spend our health and energy, our best years, fighting like cats and dogs to acquire what we do not really want.

In my own case, anyhow, the instinct to keep needs few and simple was certainly natural and inborn. Whence it derived, or why, is a mystery. I was born in a class of English life that had possessions. My mother enjoyed a comfortable jointure on the estate of her first husband, the Duke of Manchester; my father, as Financial Secretary to the Post Office, was well paid. They both had private means of their own as well. My early years were passed in what most would call luxury. Yet, as far back as I can remember, my desire always was to get out of it all, to mope into some kind of life where I could be natural, do without, escape from artificiality, avoid conforming to a standard of needs that we adopted merely because everybody about us also adopted it, to catch my food and cook it over a fire of my own making, to wear “any old thing,” to be free⁠—to know what I called liberty. The desire to possess was not in me.

Life, let me say at once, has very ably seconded this deep instinct in me. Possessions have never come my way⁠—not even within smelling distance. The couple of thousand pounds with which my father sent me out to farm in Canada before I was twenty were lost in six months, since when any such sum of money has carefully avoided me. Life, with tongue in cheek perhaps, noted my attitude to its gifts and consistently encouraged it. Has this been due to the absence of desire, the lack of ambition in me to become a large owner of wordly goods? Perhaps. I cannot say. The fact remains that I have never been tempted yet.

They tell me that with sudden wealth a shutter, so to peak, flies up in the mind, revealing a larger horizon of desires. Things that were not needed before and never even thought about, because they were utterly impossible, become first desirable, then necessary. The individual changes out of all knowing. This may be true, and I have certainly seen it happen with others. A bachelor friend of mine, with tastes and outlook similar to my own, married a few years ago a woman with a lot of money. As a bachelor he was happy and contented with just enough to live on simply. He was always saying he had all he needed and that money would not change him. He now has five times as much as he had before when he was comfortable in a couple of rooms. He has a car, a town house, a country house, a shooting in Scotland, and he is not only always “hard up,” but he is discontented, always worrying about money, bothered and harassed by possessions he does not really need, but thinks he needs.

In his case that shutter I mentioned flew up to some purpose; a new horizon of wants, with the power to satisfy them, opened before him. He is changed out of all recognition. Would a similar result, I ask myself, come about in me, too, if the power to accumulate possessions suddenly were mine? I think not.

I have good reasons, too, for thinking not. Life, while teasing me, has also tested me. My deep instinct I believe to be sincere and genuine. My bachelor friend just mentioned, for instance, had never known want in any shape or form; he always had enough money to live in comfort; he had never missed a meal, been obliged to pawn or gone short in the matter of clothes, boots, underwear, laundry. I have known want in every form⁠—want of food, of clothes, of a bed. Pawnbrokers were my intimate friends. Semi-starvation I have experienced for long periods. I have known, over a period of years, what it means to do without necessities, using the word in its strictest sense.

Having lost what cash I had in running a dairy farm in Ontario, Canada, and later a small hotel in Toronto, I drifted, after some months in the backwoods, to New York City. Various hardships followed in due course; I knew life in the raw; I met reality in the face. Nothing tests character better. In such circumstances what is in a man comes out. When, having literally nothing himself and in daily want of necessities, he sees round him people who have everything and to spare he finds out very clearly what it is he does want. Envy asserts itself. It must. And I remember distinctly that what I envied others was, never their immense possessions, but their liberty. As a reporter, I was always interviewing millionaires, people who owned so much that they hardly knew what to do with it all. Yet their lives, I realized plainly, were not what I craved, for it seemed to me they had lost their liberty. The man I did envy was the man who had enough money for his necessities and, his few wants easily satisfied, knew freedom.

My own dream, in the painful years of hardship between twenty-one and twenty-eight, was to have enough to live on in the woods somewhere⁠—five hundred to seven hundred and fifty dollars a year, I remember, was about my estimate then⁠—so as to be free to develop ideas and concentrate upon theories which lay in me. It was interior, not exterior, ambition that enflamed me. Writing, I saw, was a means by which I might possibly have earned that modest annual income, only I never thought I could write. It crossed my mind vaguely from time to time, but having been rather a failure as a newspaper reporter, it never occurred to me that I could write a story, much less a book. I did not even try. It was much later, at the age of thirty-six, that I began writing suddenly.

During that long period of test in New York, at any rate, I know that the desire for possessions, as such, was far from me.

Then Fate played a new card and, after a futile adventure in the Rainy River gold region, posing for a living in artists’ studios, teaching French and violin to occasional pupils, and a brief experience in making eau de cologne soap, I found myself in better circumstances as Private Secretary to James Speyer, of Speyer Bros. Mr. Speyer was a millionaire presumably; he was also a public-spirited philanthropist. My concern with him at the moment, however, is the effect of seeing such riches at close quarters upon myself. Well, smile as many may, it all made me ache. I admired, of course, the fine way he regarded himself evidently as a steward of great wealth, spending it freely to help others. I learned much from his example, should fate ever turn me into an unwilling millionaire. But, simple as his tastes were in a way, the amount of possessions a bachelor needed to feed, clothe and shelter his person, seemed to me fantastic. I kept his personal accounts⁠ ⁠… I remember I used to sigh for him. What a life! I used to say to myself. And envy, even in its faintest form, did not touch me once.

He was then (1897) building himself a new house in Madison Avenue, a miniature palace of taste, comfort, what some might call splendor, and as it slowly grew and, story by story, became furnished, I used to watch and help, doing my secretary’s work, such as it was, and think to myself: “It’s got you! You’re caught! You’ve lost your liberty!” I envied him to the point of a thousand or two dollars a year, but after that⁠ ⁠… it seemed to me his possessions called the tune for his dancing. I had no wish to spend my youth accumulating things I could not use and my old age guarding these useless accumulations or paying a lot of hirelings to do so and a second lot of hirelings to watch the first lot of hirelings. People who spent their lives in this fashion, it seemed to me, never lived at all; they were automata without real liberty; their movements, habits, actions dictated by their possessions; owned and driven by what they owned. Real living was an interior affair, and to spend all one’s energies upon externals was to miss life utterly. The kingdom of heaven⁠—the things worth owning, acquiring⁠—lie within.

It was most assuredly not due to any superior wisdom in me that I realized very early in life that the acquisition of externals meant nothing to me and that all my energies, desires, ambitions turned inwards. What always interested me most was consciousness and its development. “The proper study of mankind,” said Pope, “is man”; one single new fact about consciousness, about what man essentially is seemed to me of greater value than even a new discovery in science, certainly of more importance than any possible external possession. Knowledge I craved passionately, but it was this, and not that, knowledge. A new discovery in consciousness, I thought, must help the race more than any new discovery in science which adds to its comfort, contributes to its mechanical convenience in speed and communication or increases its mere “power over nature.” The former may improve the man himself; the latter can only better and complicate his physical condition, deepening at the same time his dependence on externals. The man who drives a machine through the air is not, by so doing, a higher type than he who drives a wooden plow.

Thus, naturally and by temperament, I turned instinctively to the wisdom of the East, where thought and energy are directed to the study and development of consciousness, rather than to the acquisition of externals. Beyond earning a living, there was nothing I wanted from any man, because no man could give me what I wanted. From my point of view, the things that mattered, the nearest to reality we may perhaps get, lay within. I watched the rich; all their energies, I noted, went to increasing what they had, to protecting and guarding it, haunted by terror of loss. With few exceptions, they had no time or inclination to think of anything else. I did not envy them. Possessions involved, I saw, the energies going outward and prevented that inward searching where the things that matter are to be found. I wanted none of those things I would have had to pay others to protect for me by loss and fire policies⁠ ⁠…

Life has ever seemed to me wonderful, amazing, thrilling. Useless possessions, I have ever felt, must choke, smother and dull this edge of life. Of what use to me is a house with twenty rooms, when I need only two, one to sleep in and one to eat and work in? Of what use a dozen troublesome servants, when I can attend to my own few wants with more success than any personal attendant can? Of what use flowerbeds, a copse, a rock-garden, when half the world is free for me to roam over it, with its forests, mountains, acres of free flowers? Of what use a dozen paid hirelings whose interests are not mine, when a little money can buy the simple service that is really necessary?

“Travel light” has always been my motto and always, I think, will be. Remain unencumbered, and you taste the edge of life at its sharpest, its finest, its sweetest.