Get me more Choglet

Was Chatwin a bit of an Orientalist, I mean in believing that the East stood for mysticism, where he would find a life that would be different from the frenetic pace of the west? Did he feel trapped in the torpor of the war that swung around him and did he find sunshine in cultures that lived unaffected by the Europe’s turmoil? I was reading a random page of The Songlines and the well, compulsive quoting from texts (very lovely, mind you) felt like a mind working frenetically to find a way out, to make sense.
Reading from a random page was soothing, without the compulsion of having to follow a storyline, but then, probably he felt that way too, the need to cut loose?
What I long for greatly now is to find my way to a small town in the Deep South like Bon Temps. I might hate it, never mind, but it seems so attractive perhaps because it has no frame of reference to my current life. I hate to say perhaps. I know that is the reason. I hate to have to give an adult explanation for a longing that sounds juvenile, otherwise.
But, well, what Chatwin says, that wandering is not the sign of neurosis, dissatisfied sexuality, but natural? What can I say? When I think of places away from home, I don’t think of forging ties, of friends (if I am lucky, perhaps), I think of a quiet heart, one that does not rage against its present, that walks in silence, utterly soothed by the sights it sees, the people it meets, without feeling the need to touch them, to form life-long bonds with them.
Is that the flaneur? Perhaps not. I dunno, it’s ok if it ain’t.
Here’s a few from Chatwin:

“Psychiatrists, politicians, tyrants are forever assuring us that the wandering life is an aberrant form of behaviour; a neurosis, a form of unfulfilled sexual longing; a sickness which, in the interests of civilization, must be suppressed.
Nazi propagandists claimed that gypsies and Jews – peoples with wandering in their genes – could find no place in a stable Reich.”

“A very brief life of Diogenes:
He lived in a tub. He ate raw octopus and lupins. He said ‘Kosmopolites eimi’. ‘I am a citizen of the world.’ He compared his wanderings through Greece to the migration of storks: north in summer, south to avoid the winter cold.”

“We Lapps have the same nature as the reindeer: in the springtime we long for the mountains; in winter we are drawn to the woods.
- Turi’s Book of Lapland