Various Via Francigena signposts
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Happy New Year! It’s good to see 2020 slink away.
The other week I accidentally came upon a TV series on PBS called The Road to Rome, about eight British personalities of varying faiths and nonfaiths, ages and physical conditions walking on the ancient Via Francigena pilgrimage route to the Eternal City. It’s part of a wider series on the network about religious pilgrimages.
(I’ve known a couple of people who completed (by foot -- a real pilgrimage) the famous El Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain. Neither told me that they got a religious experience out of it, but they much enjoyed some of the life stories of their fellow pilgrims.)
The pilgrimage-to-Rome series is a colorful travelogue, most of it outdoors. It’s very engaging, sometimes funny and sometimes a little melancholic. It got me thinking that many of our lives are frequently interrupted pilgrimages to something, though we often don’t know to where, until, maybe, the end.
T.S. Eliot wrote in “Four Quartets: “Home is where one starts from. As we grow older/ The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated….’’
But “In my end is my beginning.’’
Everyone sees himself/herself as the center of their own universes in a narrative mostly invisible to others. And that narrative involves erratic internal and external movement. We are all “road stories”.
I’m not crazy about school reunions, in part because they are partly fund-raising events, and breathed a sigh of relief last spring when my 50th college reunion was cancelled because of you know what. It was provisionally postponed to next June, but who knows if that will happen? Still, such reunions have value as venues where you learn about the narratives/pilgrimages of others while helping you better understand your own. You discover things about classmates you never knew and hear life stories of classmates whom you might not have known at all while in school
And you’re reminded of the confusions of time, how it goes forward and then seems to circle back and speeds up and slows down.
Anyway, 2021 might well be better than 2020, though it could be worse. Will we experience time in 2021 much differently than we did in slow, locked-down 2020, with its boredom and claustrophobia tempered by flashes of anxiety and even unexpected pleasures? Will it become (relatively) broad, sunlit uplands or just clearings in the woo
