by Hitt, Jack
First published in Great Britain
1994 by Aurum Press Limited,
25 Bedford Avenue, London WC1B 3AT
Copyright © Jack Hitt 1994
The extract from The Pilgrim's Guide to Santiago de Compostela
by Annie Shaver-Crandell, Paula Gerson and Alison Stones is reproduced by kind permission of Harvey Miller Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Aurum Press Limited.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN I 85410 306 7
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
1998 1997 1996 1995 1994
First published in the USA by Simon & Schuster
Printed in Great Britain by Hartnolls Ltd, Bodmin
[email protected] v1.0 27.01.2014
CONTENTS
Introduction
one Saint-Jean Pied de Port
two The Pyrenees
three Estella
four Torres del Río
five Frómista
six León
seven Ponferrada
eight Villafranca
nine O Cebreiro
ten Arzúa
eleven Santiago
For Lisa
OFF THE ROAD
Like many my age, I effortles
sly cast off the religion of my parents as if stepping out of a pair of worn trousers. It happened sometime a round college back in the 1970s and therefore was done with the casual arrogance and glibness famous to that time. I remember lounging in the last row of my required religion class. Professor Cassidy was making some relevant point, and I popped off that I would happily sum up the closed book of Western religion: The Jews invented god, the Catholics brought him to earth, and the Protestants made him our friend. Then god suffered the fate of all tiresome houseguests. Familiarity breeds contempt. With that, we dragged him into the twentieth century to die.
Afterward, the other sophomores and I ran off for the woods, read aloud the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, and lit one another’s cigarettes with our Zippos.
Let me say that my general attitude about religion has mellowed since then into a courteous indifference. On most days I side with the churches and synagogues in the everyday political battles that are called “religious” by the papers. My libertarian bent tilts enough against government that I don’t get too excited about people who want to pray in schools or erect crèches or Stars of David in front of City Hall. And yet, if I’m angry or have been drinking, I am quick to say that when it comes to goodwill on earth, religion has been as helpful as a dead dog in a ditch, and that in this century it’s been little more than a repository of empty ritual and a cheap cover for dim-witted bigotries.
So, imagine the reaction of many of my friends and relatives when I announced that I was going on a pilgrimage. And not some secular skip up the Appalachian Trail, but an ancient and traditional one. I intended to retrace the famous medieval route to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Tucked into the northwestern panhandle of Spain on the Atlantic, Santiago is a few miles inland from Europe’s westernmost spit of land, Finisterre. As its name implies, it was the end of the world until 1492. The road began in a.d. 814 when a hermit in the area stumbled upon the body of Saint James the Apostle. Since then, the road has been walked every year—in the Middle Ages by zealous millions; in more recent times by curious thousands.
For most of the late twentieth century, pilgrims to Santiago followed the shoulder of a blacktop highway paved by Generalissimo Franco. Then in the early 1980s scholars based in Estella, Spain, reacted to public concern after at least four pilgrims had been run over by trucks. Using old maps and ancient pilgrim accounts, the historians recovered vast sections of the original footpath still serving as mule or cart routes between the hundreds of poor villages along the way. Sections of the road were also intact in France, but once a modern pilgrim crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, there it was: a slightly wrinkled beeline of eight hundred authentic kilometers due west, following the setting sun by day and the streak of the Milky Way by night—over the craggy hills of the Spanish Basque territory, into the wine valleys of Rioja, across the plains of Castille, through the wheat fields of León, over the alpine mountains of Galicia, and finally into the comfort of the valley of Santiago. Depending on where I started, the walk could take two months, maybe more. Since pilgrims are supposed to arrive in town just before James’s feast day on July 25, the idea I had in mind could not have been more simple and appealing. I would fly to Europe and spend the belly of the summer walking to the end of the world.
Despite my many, obvious disqualifications for being a pilgrim, I have long had an interest in the tradition of walking the road. After all, one could dress it up with all kinds of rationales and ritual, but stripped down, a pilgrim was a guy out for some cosmically serious fresh air. So in the beginning, it was the very simplicity of the idea of pilgrimage as a long walk that attracted me. Little did I know.
The medieval argument for pilgrimage held that the hectic routine of daily life—with its business obligations, social entanglements, and petty quarrels—was simply too confusing a pace for sustained thought. The idea was to slacken that pace to the natural rhythm of walking. The pilgrim would be exiled from numbing familiarity and plunged into continual change. The splendid anarchy of the walk was said to create a sense of being erased, a dusting of the tabula rasa, so that the pilgrim could consider a variety of incoming ideas with a clean slate. If escaping life’s hectic repetition made sense in the Middle Ages, when time was measured by the passing of day and night, then it seemed to me reasonable to reconsider this old remedy now that we schedule our lives by the flash of blinking diodes.
This idea was a lot more than a Saturday hike or weekend outing. A pilgrimage would mean subletting my New York apartment, quitting my job, and resigning from my generous health plan. I would live on foot, out of a backpack, among old pueblos—some unwired for electricity, others abandoned centuries ago to become stone ghost towns. My long-set routines would be shattered, and my daily responsibilities would evaporate. I’d walk out of the pop-culture waters in which I had spent a lifetime treading and onto a strange dry land. I’d be far, far away from the AM hits that leak from cars and malls and dorms. I’d be at a blissful remove from CNN headlines and last night’s news. I wouldn’t have an opinion on whether the wife was justified in shooting her husband or whether the cop thought the ghetto kid was reaching for a knife or whether the woman had consented before the rape or whether the nanny had accidentally dropped the baby from the window... because I wouldn’t know a single fact. My mind and attention would be cleansed of all that, and I could discover what topics they turned to when so generously unoccupied. A long walk. A season of walking. As it happened, I had just reached the Dantean age of thirty-five. What better way to serve out my coming midlife crisis than on a pilgrimage?
I quickly found, though, that one cannot discharge a word like “pilgrimage” into everyday conversation and long remain innocent of the connotations that drag in its wake. I had spent the last decade working as a magazine writer and then as an editor at Harper’s Magazine. When I began to speak of my idea to associates throughout the media, I sometimes encountered polite interest. More often, I’d hear a bad joke. “Yo, Jack Quixote.” A famous New York agent told me that if I found god, to tell him he owed her a phone call.
Those who were interested enough to keep talking would sometimes pinch their eyes as if to get a better view. Their lips crinkled in apprehension. Their fear, of course, was that I might return from Spain with an improved
posture, a damp smile, and a lilac in my hand.
As a Western practice, pilgrimage is not merely out of fashion, it’s dead. It last flourished in the days of Richard the Lion-Hearted, and it was one of the first practices Martin Luther felt comfortable denouncing without so much as a hedge. “All pilgrimages should be abolished,” were his exact words. As something to do, the road to Santiago has been in a serious state of decline, technically speaking, since 1200.
The problem with pilgrimage is that, like so much of the vocabulary of religion, it is part of an exhausted and mummified idiom. We know this because that vocabulary thrives in the dead-end landfill of language, political journalism. Senators make pilgrimages to the White House. The tax cut that raises revenue is the Holy Grail of politics. Clean-cut do-gooders such as Bill Bradley and John Danforth are saints. The homes of dead presidents are shrines. Any threesome in politics is a trinity. Mario Cuomo doesn’t speak, he delivers sermons or homilies. Dense thinking is Talmudic or Jesuitical. Devoted assistants are apostles.
The connotations of what I was doing hadn’t deterred me because, before I went public, I had decided to walk the road on my own vague terms. I didn’t foresee how much the implications of this word would overwhelm my own sense and use of it. In America, for whatever reason, any discussion of Christianity eventually gets snagged on an old nail. As a Christian, you are forced to answer one single question: Do you or do you not believe that Jesus the man was god the divine? If you can’t answer that question easily, then you’ll have to leave the room.
It is strange—and I say this without cynicism or bitterness— how little that question interests me, especially as a pilgrim. In fact, the weighty topics of theology intrigue me no more today than they did in Professor Cassidy’s class. I realize it is apostasy as a pilgrim to admit this. But all those ten-pound questions— Does god exist? Is faith in the modern age possible? Is there meaning without orthodoxy?—bore me. The reason they wound up as running gags in Woody Allen’s movies is precisely their hilarious irrelevance to the lives of many of us.
I think one reason religion has become so contentious when it is expressed as politics (abortion, death penalty, prayer in school, etc.) is that the answers to those Big Questions can’t keep any of us awake. Thus, we turn to the hot-button questions about how other people should live their lives. Religion has become a kind of nonstop PBS seminar on ethics, conducted in a shout.
The result is that other unarticulated notions and yearnings once associated with religion have become intensely private. And that is why I wanted to walk to Santiago. At times it seems that the average American feels more comfortable discussing the quality of his or her orgasm on live television than talking about religion. I wondered: What are these hankerings that are so intimate they cause widespread embarrassment among my peers?
For me religion was always bound up with a lot more than graduate school theology and those incessant Protestant demands to believe in the supernatural. I grew up Episcopalian in Charleston, South Carolina. My family attended St. Philip’s Church, the oldest and most prestigious church in a town that prides itself on being old and prestigious. I served eight years there earning my perfect attendance pin in Sunday School. And every time I walked through St. Philip’s twelve-foot mahogany doors, I passed the same ten full-length marble sepulchers. Those nineteenth-century vaults contain my great-great-grandparents. Inside the church, our family always occupied the same pew and has, according to lore, since those folks in the white graves sat there. Fixed beside the altar is a brass ornament honoring a Charlestonian who died for his country. That man’s name is my name.
So, overthrowing the religion of my parents was not merely a theological affair. It was tangled up with my own ideas about the transmission of tradition, about honoring past communities, and about forging new ones. I began to wonder just what else went into the drink when I so handily gave religion the heave-ho. Now that I was thirty-five, the vagaries of religion didn’t seem quite so irrelevant as they did while I was refilling my Zippo with lighter fluid. More than anything else, I needed to take a long walk.
Since I was troubled about overthrowing the past, my long study of the even older tradition of Santiago seized my attention. The road had an Old World sense of discipline that I liked. A pilgrimage is a form of travel alien to the American temperament. We colonists like to think of ourselves as explorers, path blazers, frontiersmen always on the lam and living off the cuff. Our history is an unchartered odyssey, a haphazard trip down the Mississippi, or unscheduled stops along the blue highways. When Americans are on the road, we don’t really want to know just where we are going. We’re lighting out for the territories.
But a pilgrimage doesn’t put up with that kind of breezy liberty. It is a marked route with a known destination. The pilgrim must find his surprises elsewhere. I hadn’t the slightest idea what this would eventually mean, but I liked the idea of searching out adventure in the unlikely place of a well-trod road. There was even a sense of gratitude in that to keep my days interesting, I would be relieved of the usual devices of wacky coincidence or deadpan encounters with the locals.
I also came to realize that my word was offputting precisely because it retained a grubby literalism. A pilgrimage was about sweating and walking and participating in something. The word still had enough of its medieval flavor to suggest that one was submitting to a regime, a task, an idea whose ultimate end would be discovery, even transformation. “Pilgrimage”—those gravelly Anglo-Saxon consonants rolled around in the mouth and came out ancient. It was evocative, imaginative, and suggestive, I think, precisely because it was something so definable. For example, if I had announced that my intention was to sweep through Europe to “study heaven,” no one would assume I had in mind a distinct piece of real estate. But once upon a time, people did. The medieval worldview held that the blue sky above us was a plasmatic skin literally separating us from heaven. The engineers of the tower of Babel had nearly climbed up to it and were punished. Today, the word has lost all but its symbolic meaning. Heaven is a spent metaphor.
For many people, the entire language of religion is symbolic in this way. Even as I was growing up, god was being refined out of literal existence. In St. Philip’s parish hall, the psychedelic banners declared in letters cut from curving felt, “God is Love.”
Metaphor is a powerful literary device, but only if it is grounded to a literal meaning. Pure metaphor is corrosive and enfeebling. Think of Prince Charles.
I understood that I was assuming a vocabulary that had this medieval ring to it but had retained its breadth and complexity long after that age had ended. Chaucer rightly suspected that a pilgrimage would easily serve as the stage for the hapless circus of the entire human comedy. The passengers on the Mayflower adopted this word because they were convinced that they would transform themselves and the world, and they thought the word could adequately contain such ambition. In the Romantic period, “pilgrim” was one of William Blake’s favorite words because of its multiplicity of connotations. According to legend, Samuel Coleridge awoke from a nap to compose “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Not coincidentally, the book he was reading when he fell asleep was titled Purchas: His Pilgrimage. In the post-World War II era, only John Wayne and Kurt Vonnegut seemed to have preferred its ring.
As a tenderfoot pilgrim, the more I tried on this awkward word, the more I liked its ill fit. Heaven may no longer be literally above our heads, but the road is still beneath our feet. And until we invent our way beyond ground transportation, the word will retain its express sense of action. A pilgrimage is both inescapably metaphorical and literal, and I wanted to walk them both.
But why settle for the road to Santiago, instead of the far more prestigious routes to Rome or, especially, Jerusalem? My preference for Santiago has to do with my own rank qualifications for such a trip. In 1981, just after college, I had walked the asphalt simulacrum paved by the generalissimo. Since then I’ve kept up my reading on the history of Santia
go and have grown to admire the road’s patron saint. I appreciate him because whatever flaws I have, James is no one to talk.
In old Spanish the name Iago dates to the collapsing of the Latin name Jacobus, who after canonization became “Santiago.” In English this linguistic journey turned “Jacobus” to James. As a man, James is always described as a major player among Jesus’ apostles, one of the top three along with his brother John and Peter. James was present for the transfiguration, when Jesus turned into a column of light. He was among the three intimates invited into the garden of Gethsemane for the agony when Christ begged that “this cup pass from me.” Despite this privileged status, the Bible isn’t very forthcoming about him. James’s character is sketchy. He almost never speaks. But in the scattered clues, he slowly comes into focus. James’s mother was Salome, said to be Mary’s sister, making James a first cousin toJesus. Salome had money and reportedly funded a lot of Jesus’ work, including paying for the Last Supper. She was also the Holy Land’s version of a stage mother, constantly promoting her sons to Jesus.
In the gospels, James always appears alongside his brother John, and the two of them come across as dim-witted sycophants who snaked their way into the boss’s confidence but didn’t know what to do once they got there.
On one occasion, Christ is confronted by skeptics. James and John tell Jesus just to give them the word—wink, wink—and they will eliminate those doubters by calling down a thunderbolt from above. In the words of Luke 9:54: “Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them?” Christ shushes them and says, “The Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.” During this exchange, the reader senses that Jesus is beginning to understand just what kind of men James and John are. According to Luke, Jesus “turned” to them and said, “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of.” This line is from the King James version, the most elegant English translation of the Bible. One can’t help but wonder what Christ actually said. Later, Jesus starts calling James and John by a nickname—Boanerges, or “Sons of Thunder.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Jesus is being sarcastic here.