Wanderlust

I’m reading about Isabelle Eberhardt, who after an anarchist upbringing, left her native Geneva for Algeria and spent the rest of her days riding horseback in the desert, smoking kif, writing, cross-dressing, and having affairs. This is from one of her diaries, as cited in “The Destiny of Isabelle Eberhardt” by Cecily Mackworth.

“If the strangeness of my life were the result of snobbishness or posing, people might be able to say: She brought it on herself! But that is not the case; no one ever lived more from day to day and more according to hazard than I do. It is the inexorable chain of events that has led me to this point and not I who have created those events. Perhaps the strangeness of my nature may be summed up in one characteristic—the seeking for new events, at whatever cost, and the flight from inaction and immobility.”