Monasticats

One of the more complex pleasures of my profession is to have played some role in the education of brilliant undergraduate students who later go on to become famous scholars. If you have ever heard of William of Champeaux—which is at least possible—it is only because he was the teacher of Abelard, of whom you have certainly heard. One of several Abelardian eminences whose reflected glory combats the falling shadows of my senectitude is the provost of Georgetown, James J. O’Donnell. He has appeared once before in this blog, around which we conduct a laconic and intermittent correspondence.

O’Donnell has produced the definitive edition of the Confessions of Saint Augustine, but he is also what you would call a “general reader”. It is he, for example, who introduced me to Chic Sale’s The Specialist, the ne plus ultra in outhouse humor. Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, the “prince of travel writers,” died on June 10. As comment on this sad event, a week or so later Jim forwarded to me one of his favorite Fermorian prose gobbets, a description of a religious liturgy in a two-man Greek Orthodox mini-monastery:

The church, which is scarcely larger than the oratory of a castle, is dedicated to All the Saints. A lowered sanctuary lamp and the tapers that lighted the breviaries of Father Christopher and Bessarion dispelled a little the surrounding shadows. But outside their narrow pools of light, all was dark. I leant in one of the miserere-stalls that lined the small semicircular bay on the right of the chancel. The corresponding apsidal concavity on the left was lost in gloom. The three of us were alone in the church. As Bessarion chanted the office, I attempted to follow the neumes and flexions and quarter-tones in the oriental-sounding monody by the dots and the rise and fall of the slender curves and pothooks in scarlet ink above the text on the taper-lit page. The hair of both the monks, usually twisted into buns and tucked under their headgear, now tumbled in long twists half-way down their backs. From below, the candle-light threw peculiar shadows on the waxen features of Bessarion and sharply defined the deep eyesockets, the fiercely bridged nose and quizzically wrinkled brow of Father Christopher, when, censer in hand, a magnificent colossus in splendid and threadbare vestments, he emerged from the altar. His deep voice groaned the responses to the higher pitch of Bessarion. At a pause in the liturgy, the deacon swung the pyramidal lectern round on its pivot, turned the pages, and began intoning the panegyric of St. Demetrios. Makry the tom cat stalked slowly into the church and up to the rood-screen; the light from the central arch cast his elongated shadow portentously across the flagstones. Nimbly he leapt on the high, mother-of-pearl-inlaid octagonal table supporting the lectern and, curling his tail neatly round his haunches, sat gazing at the page. Without a break in the chanting, Bessarion pushed the raised paw away form the margin and gently stroked the tortoiseshell head as he sang; and slowly the long liturgy unfolded.

 

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011)

A glorious piece of writing, indeed, a  tribute alike to an author’s power and a reader’s taste. I had not read the book from which it comes (Roumeli), and one detail in it captured my special attention: the tortoiseshell cat. That is because among the four-foot shelf of Fleming’s unpublished (because unwritten) books is a study of monks and animals: The Monastic Menagerie.

In it cats would claim an important chapter. The best known is probably the industrial-sized cat who is Saint Jerome’s constant eremitic companion, just as in the secular tradition, and for nearly identical reasons, he is the companion of Androcles. But the most delightful monasticat is surely the humble mouser, Pangur Bán, who crept about the scriptorium of the famous island abbey of Reichenau, in the Bodensee, probably sometime in the eighth or ninth century. In the margins of one of his manuscripts a nameless Irish monk, far from home, wrote in his native vernacular tongue a charming poem about Pangur Bán, whose Irish name means something like “Whitey,” “Snow White”, or rather (with a scriptural allusion to Mark 9:3) “Transfiguration White”.

Bulger Bán and Pangur Bán, alias McCavity, the Mystery Cat

"For he's a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity." 

(Irish expatriates appear to be partial to the name “Whitey”, whether for felines or felons.)

Here are its opening lines:


I and Pangur Bán, my cat
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night.
Better far than praise of men
'Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.
'Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.
Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way:
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net…

You should read the whole poem, which has been rendered into English by many eminent hands, including several well-known Irish poets. I want to recommend this translation of the English medievalist Robin Flower, because he so clearly presents the poem’s actual subject, which is that special mode of scriptural exegesis called by the monks the lectio divina. The lectio divina (“sacred reading”) was to the pleasures of the heart and mind what the Slow Food Movement is to the pleasures of the tongue and gullet. The medieval monks savored their readings in the Bible, which they sometimes compared to the extraction of honey from the comb or marrow from the bone. For they sought what they called the “spiritual sense” of a text, its veiled or allegorical meaning. That is what the old Irish poet meant by capturing a meaning with the net of his thought.

Reichenau today

Our own English poetry was born of the monastic life. Bede tells us as a notable wonder the story of the poet Caedmon, an uneducated agricultural worker in the coeducational monastery at Whitby in Yorkshire. Though illiterate, Caedmon, through divine inspiration, was able to transpose into English verse the Bible stories read to him by the brothers. Bede draws his very traditional monastic simile from the bovines rather than the felines: “And he was able to learn all that he heard, and, keeping it all in mind, just as a clean animal chewing cud, turned it into the sweetest song.”

The word hermit literally means a “desert-dweller,” and the old practitioners of the lectio divina associated themselves metaphorically with the four little critters of the wasteland (Proverbs 30:24) that are “the least upon the earth, yet exceeding wise”: the ant, the grasshopper, the rock-dwelling rabbit, and the lizard (stilio). It is this association that explains the recurrent zoology and entomology of learned medieval and Renaissance pictorial treatments of ascetic themes.

Saint Jerome with friends

Upstate Adventures

The Falls in the Huyck Nature Preserve, Rensselaerville NY

We have just returned from a nearly magical place called Rensselaerville, near Albany, where my wife had been invited to preach at the bicentennial celebration of the local parish church.  As the church is dedicated to the Trinity, and as it was Trinity Sunday, the topic of the sermon naturally had to be that most exalted and mysterious doctrine; and aside from perhaps Saint Augustine and Dorothy Sayers, I doubt that anyone has done a better job.  My part in the event consisted entirely in receiving graciously the lavish hospitality afforded us by various fascinating residents of the place.

Trinity Church, Rensselaerville NY, founded 1811

            Worthy though it be, however, Rensselaerville will serve this blog post only in an ancillary fashion, providing the excuse for a couple of nice photographs, and acting as an antiphrastic counterpoint to my first experience of Upstate New York, which was singularly bizarre.  For Joan has her calling, and I have had mine.       

About forty years ago I participated in an academic conference held at the State University of New York at Binghamton, probably a hundred miles west of Rensselaerville. There is at that institution a Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.  It is today a kind of living skeleton, but five or six budget-slicing governors ago it was pretty lively.  Its comparative prosperity was fostered by a director, a senior scholar in my field, who practiced unconventional economies.  He asked me if I could help save the budget a little stress by staying not at a hotel but at his daughter’s apartment, which was not far from the campus.  The daughter would return to the parental home for the week-end, and I would be joined at her place by another participating scholar, a friendly acquaintance of mine from the University of Illinois.

            Naturally, I agreed.  Elaborate three-way communications among Binghamton, Princeton, and Champaign-Urbana took care of driving instructions, the location of a secreted key, and one or two other details.  I drove up on a nasty autumn afternoon.  By the time I reached Scranton, with fifty miles still to go, the shades of night were falling fast, and snow, which had been threatening all afternoon, began in earnest.  So I was glad to get to Binghamton safely, to find the apartment after only negligible misstep, to find the key immediately and, what’s more, to find that it opened the door.

            What I did not find was my Illini friend, who never showed.  It later turned out that he had been overtaken by the storm and sought shelter in an Interstate motel.  But this was in the age before cell phones.  So I put the key back in its hiding place, wrote him a note, left the light on in his presumed bedroom, and went to bed in my own.  About three in the morning the telephone wakened me.  I intended simply to wait it out, but it continued with insistence—I mean twenty rings, maybe thirty.

            At last I answered it: “Hullo?”

            After the briefest pause, an instantly angry, feral, male voice, in which I seemed to detect chemical additives, shot back: “Donna!  Where’s Donna?”

            “Uh, Donna’s not here.  She…”

            “Listen, ---- ----, put Donna on the line, and do it now!”  He sounded scary, very scary.  Under these circumstances of nearly maximal disorientation I did not acquit myself well.  I tried, not very plausibly, to give an account of the situation.  My grandfather had an old saw: “When a man argues with a fool, the fool is doing the same thing.”  I found myself saying ridiculous things.  “Look,” I said.  “I’m a speaker.”  This fatuity merely gave him an opening for his redneck repartee.

            “Oh, yeah?  Well, I’m a speaker, too.  And I’m speaking to you right now…And I’m telling you I know exactly where that bitch’s place is.”  He spoke next about his gun and its caliber—thirty-eight—which he intended to take with him on his speaking tour, the first stop of which was apparently the bitch’s place.  The next topic was what he intended to do to me and Donna upon arrival.

            He finally got off the line.   It was then I discovered that I was alone in the house, that Prof. Illinois was a no-show.  That night I slept no further.  I reclaimed the key from the icy front porch—for all I knew he was accustomed to finding it there himself—then sat for three hours in the pre-dawn dark watching the dimly lit street through a crevice of Venetian blind.  Nothing but wind and waving limbs.

            I was not in the greatest form for my speaking role the next morning, but I got through it.  As I sat listening to other papers, very few of which reached the standard of my wife on the Trinity, I wrestled with an inner moral dilemma.   The matter seemed to me delicate.  I didn’t know Donna from Adam—or Eve either, for that matter.  I knew Donna’s father only slightly.  But I myself was a father—of quite young children, to be sure—and I had to imagine that any father would want to know, and need to know, about the maniac on the phone.  So seizing my courage in both hands, I took the distinguished Professor X aside at the afternoon coffee break.

            “Uh, Bernie, look…this is very awkward, but I have to tell you about a disturbing thing that happened last night…”

            “Yeah?  Really?  What’s that?”

            “Well, there was this phone call…it was for Donna, but of course I answered it.  There was a man, maybe drunk, maybe high, but violent-sounding…and…he seemed to have some relationship with Donna, and he…”

            My host, looking very puzzled, cut me off with a query: “Donna?  Who’s Donna?”  His daughter’s name was Susan.  I had apparently been terrorized by a seriously wrong number.

           

           

Thomas Hardy vs. the Indeterminate Sentence

I am told that in penological circles no topic is more hotly debated today than that of the indeterminate sentence. Some bad man does some bad thing, and a Judge says: “That’ll be three to seventeen years [or whatever] in the Allegheny Work House [or wherever].” The indeterminacy is supposed to be an encouragement to the felon, so that he might deport himself in such a way as to be more consistent with the smaller rather than the larger number. Of course determinacy might also be an encouragement. In the middle of the eighteenth century a naval court martial condemned Admiral John Byng to death for his supposed cowardice or incompetence at a battle in the Balearic Islands. There were extenuating circumstances, but Voltaire wryly remarked that now and again the British felt they had to hang an admiral in order to encourage the others.

But I must not digress. This post is about indeterminate sentences, and I am against them. That is, Thomas Hardy and I are against them. There is an experience that most readers surely have shared while walking through some populated place, or when crossing with pedestrians walking in the opposite direction. One catches what we call a “snatch” of conversation. Overheard cell phone conversations are also good for this purpose. Sometimes one hears things so extraordinary as to pose a challenge to the imagination. What possible context might lend them coherence?

Once on a street in Rye, Sussex, I encountered two elegant gentlemen, one of whom said to the other: “Was it ormolu? I mean, actually ormolu?” That is all I heard. Here the indeterminacy is fathered by the word “actually”. It is weird enough that anything might be ormolu, but that one would have to attest to its actually being ormolu is just too much. How many things out there are just pretending to be ormolu? Another dilly once overheard was this: “…only solution—get a divorce, or fire the Chinese cook”. I leave that one up to you.

Is it....actually?

Of course a “snatch” of conversation is by definition fragmentary. A sentence is by definition “the expression of a complete thought.” Yet more and more of the prose I encounter in my daily rounds, though ostensibly written in complete sentences, seems strangely indeterminate. Often the problem is one form or another of SDS (the Syntactic Derangement Syndrome), which is now pandemic in editorial offices on both sides of the Altantic. The copybook example of SDS is probably known to you: “Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while riding to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope”. A clever diagnostician will identify the problem here easily enough, and call in the word-surgeons. Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while traveling to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope….Just kidding.

More often, however, the level of incoherence is more comprehensive and hence more baffling. I am usually up and about quite early, some considerable time before the brightening of the eastern sky or the arrival of the New York Times on the carport driveway. At such hours, in my continuing quest for self-improvement, I visit websites claiming to offer news, sometimes even the “latest news”. For the past two or three days I have intentionally avoided American sites, having reached saturation point so far as congressional undergarments are concerned. So this morning I went first to the BBC page. Was I any better off? You be the judge.

The story that greeted me there was summarized in the following sentence: “On Monday, Mr MacMaster, originally from the US state of Georgia but now a student at the University of Edinburgh, said he was sorry for posing as a Syrian lesbian”. What interests me is less the story itself, engaging though it be, than the puzzle presented by the sentence. There is no way to tell what, amidst all the information seemingly contained, the author considers important. Is it Mr. MacMaster’s contrition or his Cracker origins? Would he be equally sorry for posing as a Sudanese lesbian? How about a Syrian bricklayer? Is Monday as significant as its rhetorically emphatic position might suggest?

By chance I happen just now to be reading The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy. Further by chance its opening sentence is superficially similar in its construction to that cited from the BBC news summary. “One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in upper Wessex, on foot.” The big difference is that Thomas Hardy knew how to write a consequential sentence. A reader just knows that every clause in that sentence is stress-bearing. The reader probably also suspects, since it is Hardy, that the child will be dead in no time at all, and the woman soon enough, leaving the man to arrive at his miserable end with Victorian leisure. But Hardy’s is a sentence that makes you want to turn the page, not to send the writer off to writer’s camp for three to seventeen weeks.

 Their fates will be cruel, but ever so well written

My First Century of Blogging

 This post witnesses the completion of my first century of blogging. If this claim seems implausible, the problem is probably philological. Cricket fans and readers of Thomas Traherne will have no difficulty, but quite a few other people seem to have forgotten the primary meaning of the word century, which is “a hundred of something”. A hundred years is only one possibility. Long before that it was the hundred centurions making up that division of a Roman legion called a centuria.

A similar fate has befallen decade, “ten of something,” now used almost exclusively to mean ten years. We don’t think that the only thing you can have a dozen of is eggs, do we? But our universal anxiety with time sweeps all before it, including your bloguiste as he sets about writing his one hundredth blog post. For the wheels of Time’s Winged Chariot have been clattering rather than whirring softly since my last effort. For starters, I turned seventy-five on the very day I flew to Europe. Yet more sobering was the news that reached me when after several days I reconnected with my email in Compostela. My Sewanee classmate and long-time friend Dave Evett had died on May 25 at his home in the Boston suburbs.  Herein, perhaps, is a topic of sufficient solemnity for the occasion.

David Hal Evett (died 25 May 2011).  May the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace.

David was a great man—brilliant, talented, energetic--an athlete, a singer, an actor, a powerful writer. Our careers, personal and professional, had several external parallels. When we first met in the fall of 1954 we were amused by the coincidence that we both came from small towns called Mount Pleasant—one in Michigan, the other in Texas, but both double misnomers. After college Dave went to Dijon on a Fulbright Scholarship, then on to Harvard for his Ph. D. in English and, as it turned out, an equally doctoral spouse, with whom he would raise three highly accomplished children. We almost but not quite overlapped in the English Department at Wisconsin, from which he later moved on to a long and distinguished career at Cleveland State University. He was the author of important studies in the field of Renaissance Literature. In retirement he and Marianne removed to the Boston area, where all three of their children had put down roots. He died peacefully, as I understand it, after a meal at which his whole family was gathered.

Dave was also an excellent poet. In lieu of a Christmas card he would send out each year an original Christmas poem, and we never could regard our seasonal preparations as complete until it arrived. Naturally in my state of disorganization I cannot now lay my hands on the anthology of these poems he prepared for distribution at our fiftieth class reunion a few years past. But I do have one poem of his in my computer—one not entirely inappropriate for this blog century. It is called “Alumni News,” and it responds to the announcement of the death in 2004 of another classmate (called by the poet’s sensitive pseudonym Matthew George Todd), once close friends to us both.

Probably no more lost than most

Gertrude Stein famously called her fast-living expatriate Parisian friends of the 1920s “a lost generation”. But I doubt that her generation was much loster than mine—or perhaps yours, or any other. The sheer number of my bright shining classmates who crashed upon the shoals of life, not a few of them last seen adrift on a sea of alcohol, is appalling. Of them there might seem no more poignant example of sheer waste than that afforded by “M .G. Todd”. Evett’s evocation of the “inheritors of unfulfilled renown”—a famous and tragic phrase from Shelley’s “Adonais”—was hardly hyperbolic, given this man’s talent and potential. Like most good poems, this one tells a story, the outlines of which are sufficiently clear, even without any footnote explication of its enriching details:



ALUMNI NEWS


Matthew George Todd, ’58, of Austin, Texas, died March 11, 2004.


Lean, cool,
with a voice like George Sanders'
and a wry snort of a laugh
and a graduation watch identical to mine.
Riding the Southern on the last leg together,
Nashville to Cowan, Tennessee,
through leads in the senior play,
basketball, Hemingway,
we frisked into cronyhood
like two dogs into a wood.
Bronze hours:
dismayed to find him deadly from the key,
though I was stronger off the boards,
I challenged him at tennis,
and lost there, too;
we both paid homage to Bill Rotten
if the last trump refused to fall.
When the old Dodge balked
an hour north of Knoxville
on the way to some Virginia college weekend
we watched the winter sun strike
through the window of a clean, well-lighted place
the silver bubbles rising through the Bud,
the plywood booth, the green baize; Keats
was more real to us than the bodies of girls, then,
and we were all inheritors
of unfulfilled renown.
Later, he dared auditions and casting calls
off Times Square, the high life
of singles in D.C. played
against a barren federal job,
too much drink and sex,
while I took a safer road
through graduate school and marriage.
After this fraying globe
spun him back to Rose City, Texas,
an epistolary confession
twenty years long
on sheets from yellow legal pads
tracks his battles
with the flesh and the world and the church:
addiction was the Devil,
he knew, and wrote a long, strange book
to prove it that no-one would publish.
When a draft of this sat unread
while I tried to finish a book of my own
the letters stopped. I let it lie.
Can we not think about how he died last month,
leaving me this glum rage
over the slow corrosion
of bronze hours and my failure as a friend,
and about that devilish voice instead?
Three no trump? Double, I say. Snort.
Is there any more beer?  [David H. Evett, 2004]

The concluding lines about the obligations of friendship cut to the quick.  After twenty years of silence "Todd" had resurfaced in my sphere as well, first with a mad and truculent essay about the Cathars, then with the searing but incoherent manuscript about addiction to which the poem alludes.  One didn't know where to begin.  I, too, "let it lie".  But a couple of years later, around 2000, an academic conference took me to Austin.  By a near miracle I tracked "Todd" down by mail, and arranged to meet him for a meal.  He had greeted my initiative with something like enthusiasm, but the night before our scheduled meeting he called me at my hotel.  He abruptly, rudely, indeed angrily cancelled, then hung up the phone. I never saw him nor heard from him again.

As for David and me, the friendship was continuous if seriously intermittent.  In the last decade (of years, I mean) we tried to meet at least once each year, in New York in November, at an annual conclave of the somewhat Trollopian group known as the Guild of Scholars of the Episcopal Church.  We had in fact pre-scheduled a private conversation on the topic of "the nature of religious faith" for last November, but I bagged it when I had the chance to go to Paris instead.  At the time it seemed to me one of life's easier choices--between talking about religious faith or going to Paris, I mean.  Now I am not quite so sure.  I'll think about it more during the next century.

 The Cumberland Mountains around Sewanee TN

Paean to the Pilgrims

Joanna Peregrina

It has been facetiously remarked of long-married couples that the partners become so used to putting up with each other through compromise and accommodation that in time they approach near identity even in physical appearance. Approaching my current physical appearance is not a fate I would wish upon most enemies, let alone my life partner, so I was delighted to discover that even after being married for forty-eight years, eleven months, and twenty-five days I could discover an entirely new and unprecedented reason for admiring my wife. As Shakespeare’s Enobarbus says of Cleopatra:
             Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
             Her infinite variety….
Fortunately, the context in which I recalled the lines was much more propitious than that in which Shakespeare had placed them in his play. It was last Friday, about 11:15 in the morning (local time) near the entrance to the south transept of the medieval cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain. In a miracle nearly as astounding as any of those performed of old by the ferocious apostle himself, we actually successfully met up as planned with our pilgrims—two moving needles in a large and chaotic moving haystack of ambulatory humanity. Though the calculation is not yet absolutely final, Joan and her friend Susan had walked just under a thousand miles to get there.

 Susan & Joan / Compostela 27 v 2011  What a feat!  Also, what feet!

Five years ago, Joan’s friend and fellow Dante student Susan—twenty years Joan’s junior--was facing her fiftieth birthday. She suggested that a good way to mark the event would be to walk upwards of two thousand kilometers through southern France and northern Spain. You or I might think of a less strenuous way to be festive, but as the old saying goes, Different strides for different brides.

There were literally hundreds of pilgrimage sites in medieval Europe, but the three greatest were Jerusalem, Rome, and Compostela, the legendary home of the relics of Saint James “the Greater”, the brother of Jesus. I use the word "legendary" with some temerity, as Spaniards of the Middle Ages and Renaissance entertained no doubts whatsoever. Saint James, Santiago (i.e. San Yago or San Diego), became their national patron saint, and in his martial role as Matamoros (“the Moor-slayer”) an emblem of their ferocious ethnic cleansing in the fifteenth century and their imperial expansion in the sixteenth.

Any reader of Chaucer will know that medieval pilgrims undertook their travels out of many motives; but a long pilgrimage was always a serious business. The original meaning of the English word "travel" is preserved in the French travail—work—a form preserved in our tongue only for the agonies of childbirth. Travel was in fact so difficult, dangerous, and painful that it was appropriately undertaken as expiation for serious crimes. Canon law required those preparing for a “major” pilgrimage to leave behind their properly executed wills. The chances that they would die en route were significant.

The Compostela pilgrimage drew Christians from all parts of Europe, and it has left its memorial traces in many surprising places. (The rue Saint-Jacques in the Latin quarter of Paris, for example, takes its name from its original destination.) The scallop-shell emblem, originally an attribute of the saint himself, has become the more or less universal emblem of pilgrimage. “How should I your true love know from another one?” sings Ophelia in Hamlet. “By his cockle hat and staff, And his sandal shoon.” In recent years, the Compostela pilgrimage has enjoyed a remarkable rebirth of popularity. The percentage of seriously “religious” pilgrims is not large, but probably not proportionately much different from in Chaucer’s day—about three twenty-ninths in my calculation. There are also many young outdoors types, and lots of life transitions and inner searches. The mode of a few would appear, perhaps, to be that of the Wife of Bath: better described as cruising than journeying.  Of course the theory of medieval asceticism always linked the voluntary embrace of self-abnegation with material ministration to a needy world.  Joan and Susan called their undertaking "a pilgrimage with a purpose"--one external part of which was to raise a significant amount of money in aid of an imaginative international charity--the Worldwide Orphans Foundation.

 The Apostle's Reliquary

But what an adventure! What an engine of companionship! Chaucer’s pilgrims started out in a pretty fancy hotel where they were “esed atte beste.” Joan and Susan, like the huge numbers of today’s Compostela pilgrims, had to content themselves with modest commercial or monastic hostels. So far as I can tell the most typical activity of pilgrims is the nightly hand-washing of intimate items of apparel! You can trace the four stages of our pilgrims’ progress on the map below.

Their plan evolved.  Originally, they had plotted the pilgrimage for three stages in three succeeding years.  The demands of what we laughingly call "real life," however, soon showed that they could not devote more than seventeen or eighteen days of walking to a stage.  This meant it would require four stages.  Though circumstances made them miss one year, they kept to their revised design: four stages of almost 250 miles each, averaging fifteen miles of serious hiking a day.   Stage 1: from Le Puy en Velay in south-central France to the old medieval city of Cahors. Stage 2: Cahors to Saint-Jean Pied de Port, the traditional crossing place across the Pyrenees into Spain. Stage 3: Saint-Jean to Sahagún between Burgos and León. Stage 4: Sahagún to Compostela. The other pilgrim spouse (also a John) and I have thought of ourselves as a kind of technical “support team”—sort of like the guys who used to accompany Channel-swimmers in a motor launch, ever ready to beat off shark attacks. Pilgrimage turns out to be much easier if aided by the Wizard of Avis. But no cross, no crown. We didn’t get a diploma, the way the ladies did.

The purpose of this blog post is to salute my remarkable wife on a remarkable accomplishment. To gain their certification, pilgrims must register a few vital statistics with the peregrine officials. Joan did note that she was the sole septuagenarian on the large ledger sheet she signed. I doubt there were many on other pages either.
We know that life is a pilgrimage, and so also no doubt is marriage. There are other metaphors as well. We stumbled upon one quite by accident. We spent a most pleasant day in Compostela, before moving on to Madrid for some tapas and Velasquez, and thence back home. Old Compostela has many attractions, quite apart from Santiago and his golden shrines, and we hope one day to return. In the old Dominican monastery, now the regional museum of Galicia, there is a fascinating triplex helicoidal staircase, the work of the seventeenth-century Compostelan architect Domingo Antonio de Andrade. Three soaring sets of steps, each seemingly unsupported and each interlacing but never touching its fellows, rise from the old cloister level to the several stories of the old monastic buildings.

We started up separate flights and for a while circled each other, now coming closer, now drifting away. But by chance the flight I had chosen stopped one floor short of the top, and I was left looking up in admiration at my spouse’s greater ascension. Looking up, perhaps, as the poet Dante once did—
              E quasi peregrin, che si ricrea
              nel tempio del suo voto riguardando,
              e spera già ridir com’ ello stea…(Par. xxxi, 43-45)
And, as a pilgrim, in the temple of his vow / content within himself, looks lovingly about / and expects to tell his tale when he gets home.