Pilgrimages and literature

When Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales at the end of the 14th century, pilgrimages to shrines like St. Peter´s at  Rome, St. James the Greater´s at Compostela or St. Thomas Becket´s at Canterbury were very popular. Pilgrims, who used to go in company for protection, had a wide variety of purposes: to venerate a saint, to do penance for sin or to be healed of some sickness.

In Chaucer´s masterpiece, a group of them meet at an inn as the starting point and, on their way to the cathedral of Canterbury, they engage in a tale telling contest. The landlord has offered a free dinner for the best story. The tales, mere entertainment for a hard journey, turn out to be a remarkable anthology in Middle English of medieval literature: courtly romance, saints´ legends, sermons, fabliaux, beast fables...

On my recent "Camino", Way of Saint James, there have also been moments for stories and literature. Since every single item in my rucksack had to be weighed (travel light was a must!), I could only afford to take one paperback with me. After hours and hours of often silent walking every day, there was always some time for sitting and reading in the youth hostels or engaging in enriching talk with other pilgrims. Camaraderie and fellowship made it possible to exchange anecdotes and personal stories, other books or anything you might need.

More than purposes or goals set before starting the "Camino", I can write about the rewards gained during this life-affirming, physically challenging and fulfilling experience. Each completed day built on everybody´s self-confidence. For me, it has also turned out to be a journey of inner peace and faith in myself.   

Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett

"Life is a chaos between two silences", said Samuel Beckett. The Irish playwright was only sure of two things: he had been born and he had to die. He left Dublin and travelled to Paris with the obsession of meeting James Joyce. He joined the novelist´s literary circle there and became his assistant. But Lucia, Joyce´s schizophrenic daughter, fell in love with him and his refusal of her caused Ulysses´s author to ban him from his home.

Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, Beckett is one of the great names of the Theatre of the Absurd. First written in French, Waiting for Godot is a metaphor of the absurdity of human existence, of man´s loneliness and boredom and of the deseperate search for meaning in life. Throughout the play, and while they are waiting for Godot, the main characters, two tramps, try to fill in the empty time on an eternal Saturday which follows Good Friday but which never becomes Easter Sunday. Very little 

happens, life is meaningless. Like them, we also spend much of our time waiting constantly for something new to happen so that our life has sense. Their incoherent dialogue dramatically shows our failure to communicate. Literary critics have wondered who this Godot is, someone who seems to be on the point of arriving but who never does so. Beckett used to say that if he had had the answer, he would have written it.

One day, Beckett was flying to Paris when the chief flight attendant said: "I´m speaking in Captain Godot´s name..." Immediately, he wanted to jump out of the plane up in the air.

The Little Prince

Sometimes I look around and see nothing but foolishness and nonsense. 

Mankind, too worried with power, wealth and technology, seems to have forgotten about the importance of sincere friendship and true love. Most people don´t even realise that "to forget a friend is sad. No every one has ever had a friend." 

A great deal of grown-ups, full of prejudices and misjudgements, are not sensitive to the poetry, mystery and beauty of the world. They are dull, unimaginative, ignorant and blind to the simple things that matter. They don´t even know that "the most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart."

Sometimes it seems to me that adults, so narrow-minded and absurd, are constantly rushing and stubbornly keeping on mindless pursuits, but at the end "no one is ever satisfied where he is." 

I´ve just finished rereading Antoine de St. Exupéry´s masterpiece (so proud to have been able to do it in French this time!) and, again, it has left me reflecting about the sense of life...

Sometimes, like The Little Prince, I am also bewildered by what I see and experience every day. Like him, I go on my quest for understanding the meaning of this strange world. And meanwhile, I continue gazing at the stars...

The Great Gatsby

So much violence and the nonsense of World War I left Americans in such a state of shock that those who could afford it turned to a wild life of excess to compensate. The unprecedented levels of prosperity of the nation enabled F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, icons of the Roaring Twenties, to live extravagantly staying out late and drinking heavily in continuous lavish parties. The couple, who idolized wealth and luxury, was really fascinated by the very rich and all their magic. Their sprees continued in Paris, so full of youthful idealism, where they soon became part of a celebrated circle of American expatriates. 

But F. Scott Fitzgerald could also see through all that glitter of the Jazz Age, discovering the moral emptiness and hypocresy beneath this pointless pursuit of pleasure. The Great Gatsby is the tragic hero, solely faithful to a dream. All the wealth he has been able to achieve has only one aim; to recover his former love Daisy. But the mistake is to try to recapture the past and carry it into the future. His spiritual quest, in a materialistic society,  is to be defeated by selfishness and indifference.

The story represents the disintegration of the American Dream and those times of economic growth and loss of moral values should sound familiar to us. They turned out to be a warning sign of harder times to come. 

Shakespeare & Company Bookshop in Paris

"On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books in the window, and photographs of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive"

                                                                   Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

These lines depict Sylvia Beach´s Shakespeare & Company Bookshop, a haven for all English speaking writers in Paris during the interwar period and a gathering place for regulars like Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald or James Joyce. With the German occupation of the city it was closed down, but a few years later, an American bohemian, George Whitman, would open another bookstore with the same name and the same ideals. It continued to be a free boarding house for aspiring and penniless writers and the new owner went on playing host to well known authors like Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett or the Beat poets W. Burroughs and A. Gingsberg. Whitman´s daughter runs it today, still managing to hold on its original principles.

I´ve recently visited it for the first time and I can assure you it´s worth it: on the floor, piles of second-hand books stacked there because there is no room left on the ancient wooden bookshelves; on the walls, old photos, drawings and newspaper cuttings yellowed by the years; an old typewriter, a piano waiting to be played, worn-out velvet armchairs for sitting and reading... An incredible place to hang out for those instilled with a deep and passionate respect for literature.

Take note! Facing Notre Dame Cathedral, on the left bank of the river Seine... It had to be situated in the legendary literary Latin Quarter..

The Mousetrap at the Niemeyer Centre

Agatha Christie´s The Mousetrap has been on stage in London´s West End since 1952, being the longest running play in the world. Its brilliant intricate plot still keeps engaging the audience from start to finish. 

Agatha Christie belongs to the Golden Age of the detective novel, during the inter-war period. Heiress of Conan Doyle´s tradition, her books were meant to be pure entertainment, games where readers matched wits with the author. One of her breakthroughs was to move crime from the predominantly urban world where it had always been set to the quietness of the English village; Monkswell Manor is the guesthouse where this extremely clever puzzle is set. The spectators are kept on the edge of their seats due to an atmosphere of shuddering suspense, suspicious clues, double identities, secret passions, hatred... and they are surprised at a tricky and startling denouement.

It was not in London, but in Avilés, at the Oscar Niemeyer International Cultural Centre, where I could also be captivated by this classic whodunit a few days ago. The project of the futuristic and controversial Centre was a present from the Brazilian architect to the Principality to give thanks for his Prince of Asturias Award for Art in 1989. 

We have just been told the great Oscar Niemeyer has passed away. He would have been 105 in a week.

Unforgettable books and stories

If I had to choose a single remarkable book from all those I have ever read, I would rescue one from my childhood: The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde.

Before being able to read it on my own, I remember my mum telling us the wonderful story of this charming prince.  Having turned a blind eye to the hardship and miseries of his people during his lifetime, he is now a golden statue on a tall column in the centre of a city, from where he sees nothing but ugliness and suffering. He feels such a great sorrow and sympathy for all that poverty that the sapphires that are his eyes weep. He cannot bear what surrounds him... A fairy tale of a prince without a princess, but with a swallow which plays her role, it reminds everybody of the importance of love, inner beauty, sacrifice and charity. What a moving and instructive story for a child! What a moving and instructive story for anyone!

Wilde used to say that he had not written it "for children, but for childlike people from eighteen to eighty". Once more, he was making witty and satiric allusions to contemporary issues like the tremendous gap between the rich and the poor. He did not only aimed at ridiculing and scandalising that rigidly conventional Victorian society, but also at attacking its lack of humanitarian feelings. The dangerous game he was playing would come in with a high price...