In my black leather travel bag of necessities, I carried (or lugged) to New Rome an unnecessarily-tabbed notebook for journaling, in three sections, bon mots from the Conference (joined with less eloquent commendations or refutations). In the third section were scrawled the notes for a little story or essay, whichever form the mass will take. And in the second was for something called “impressions” – that grievous sort of loose unlucid thought released by Proust like Pandora’s box. I think Proust did something nasty to consciousness and its relationship to Time, but I don’t know what. Yet. I’ll think of something.
Also pocketed into the strata of paper and nylon dividers was my trusty but cruelly tattered and water-logged Immortal Poems of the English Language, anthologized by Oscar Williams. It is now sheathed by mailing tape ever since it was baptized by a rogue Atlantic wave at Sandbridge years ago. I found Yeats, Byron, and Omar Khayyam to be trustier guides than the party-head stuff supplied by the Lonely Planet (a name, by the way, prophetic of the new third world -- “third,” I mean, in the Rieffian sense, not in the warm fuzziness of the United Nations).
Along with these were my volume of The Hours of Prayer (my diocesan book of canonical devotions); and, signaling my attempt to be current on things Istanbullian, Orhan Pamuk’s book, eponymously entitled The Black Book. A book which shall join many others on my shelf, glaring at me with reproach for having failed my vow to better my cosmopolitan sensibilities.
Lastly, the shabbiest of my bibliographic companions was The Path to Rome, by Hilaire Belloc. I took this wretchedly-edited book (the hardpress.com edition, if one can burden the word “edition” with such a bankrupt accident or particular manifestation as this instant) because I thought it diverting and gnomic to read of his path to the old Rome, whilst I wended my way to the New.
Laying aside, for a short while, my complaints about the illiterati at hardpress.com (what is meant here by “hard”?), I look now upon the scraggly lines of blue and unfortunate pink (I took up this cursed highlighter over the Alps when the blue ran out) that have overlaced the pages of my now-favorite interlocutor. Providentially, the second half of Chesterbelloc prepared me well for Constantinople.
It is good to cathect, or interject, the images of geography into memory, as the soul needs these solids to ride on and to reside in. That is what travel does, from place to place: it breaks the constant temptation to stop, fantasize, and demonically fabricate one’s own little Hadian world. This is why little pilgrimages are needed, even if one only went to Church on a Sunday, because his own mundane procession of images and feelings are not really home, but a sedimentation of falsifications. Travel is needed, pilgrimage is called for, to go to a difference and a sacrament, to grasp the stuff of Time, and thence to return, to achieve Home, for pilgrimage is only and ever a story of Homewardness, never merely a soliloquy of musing outward-bound.
It is sad that the university world (and also the adolescent universe into which we have all been damned, temporarily) has rejected home, pilgrimage and paradise. Here are a few words of Belloc on this theme, in which he treats of that favored Chesterbellocian story of the “Return” – their unwitting term for the inevitable direction of Faith toward Orthodoxy, had they known better:
What is it, do you think, that causes the Return? I think it is the problem of living; for every day, every experience of evil, demands a solution. That solution is provided by the memory of the great scheme which at last we remember. Our childhood pierces through again … But I will not attempt to explain it, for I have not the power; only I know that we who Return suffer hard things; for there grows a gulf between us and many companions. We are perpetually thrust into minorities, and the world almost begins to talk a strange language; we are troubled by the human machinery of a perfect and superhuman revelation; we are over-anxious for its safety, alarmed, and in danger of violent decisions.
And this is hard: that the Faith begins to make one abandon the old ways of judging. Averages and movements and the rest grow uncertain. We see things from within and consider one mind or a little group as a salt or leaven …
[We think] of this deplorable weakness in men that the Faith is too great for them, and accepting it as an inevitable burden …
There was to be no more of that studious content, that security in historic analysis, and that constant satisfaction of an appetite which never cloyed. A wisdom more imperative and more profound was to put a term to the comfortable wisdom of learning. All the balance of judgment, the easy, slow convictions, the broad grasp of things, the vision of their complexity, the pleasure in their innumerable life – all that had to be given up. Fanaticisms were no longer entirely to be despised [blogger note: now that’s something to be swallowed, like asafoetida, by neo-Christian euro-academicians], just appreciations and a strong grasp of reality no longer entirely to be admired.
The Catholic Church will have no philosophies. She will permit no comforts; the cry of the martyrs is in her far voice; her eyes that see beyond the world present us heaven and hell to be confusion of our human reconciliations, our happy blending of good and evil things …
Yes, certainly religion is as tragic as first love, and drags us out into the void away from our dear homes.
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