Life & Wisdom Quote by Stijn Streuvels

Motion becomes a kind of exile here: not the romantic drift of a flaneur, but the enforced locomotion of people whose bodies have learned that stopping invites suspicion, hunger, or pity. Streuvels loads the sentence with friction. "Ever on the move" suggests compulsion, a life governed by necessity rather than desire. Then he undercuts any sense of vigor with "slow, shuffling step" - a gait that advertises fatigue and eroded dignity. The rhythm of the line itself shuffles: it drags, it doubles back, it refuses the clean snap of a heroic journey.

The comparison to "wandering beggars" does more than paint poverty; it marks a social status. Beggars in rural, tightly knit communities are visible in the worst way: known, judged, tolerated at the margins, never absorbed. "Who are nowhere at home" is the blade. Home isn't merely a building but a contract - recognition, belonging, the right to take up space without explanation. Streuvels implies a world where that contract is revoked for certain bodies, and where movement becomes a strategy for surviving exclusion.

Context matters: Streuvels wrote out of Flemish village life, attentive to labor, land, and the moral weather of small communities. His naturalism often treats environment as destiny. Here, the landscape doesn't just surround the figure; it refuses him. The intent is quietly devastating: to make homelessness feel not like an event, but like a permanent condition written into posture and pace.