My wife (Jen) and I recently visited The Seine River Cafe for breakfast, a  quiet, unassuming store front diner tucked in behind a Shell station and a Dairy Queen on Provencher, the central route winding its way through Winnipeg’s French district. It had been on my list of restaurants to visit for a while, being a celiac who is always on the lookout for new places which can accomodate the inconvenciences of this auto-immune disease.

We went early on a Sunday morning, close to when it opened, arriving to an empty restaurant. As we were sat at one of the non-descript tables, the sort of tables you would expect to find at any like minded low key diner, a friendly waitress came to take our order, leading with welcome warm cups of coffee.

It would be soon after that the diner started to fill up with people, some by themselves others arriving in couples or larger groups, each sliding up to a different table in different corners with the obvious ease and aura catering to custom and routine. Both Jen and I noticed, quietly at first to ourselves, as we observed the growing activity and conversation, every single person that came through that door appeared to be a regular. The sort where the waitresses already knew their names and orders. One such table, saddled up close to the open kitchen, naturally fed into casual conversations with the the cook and (assumed) owner, as though they were simply picking up where they last left off. It became so obvious after a while that we, by all appearances, felt certain we were the only strangers in the bunch. We barely needed to verbalize what was on both of our minds in that moment, me just beginning to open my mouth to state the obvious and Jen speaking the all to familiar words of the old Cheers sitcom- “where everyone knows your name.”

What made this moment more startling was the conversation that preceded and followed this moment. With my 50th birthday coming up quick (two days away from this particular Sunday morning venture), such milestones have a way of pushing you into expected modes of reflection on the passage of time, and if you are me, the nature of life itself. Earlier that morning I found myself talking with Jen about how the passage of time has indeed reframed the ways I experience life today, caught in this space where a world, now made primarily visible through its endless online portals, just keeps going about its business even while, in my head, this particular moment for me feels monumental, as though its stopping my world in its tracks.

For me, this is the mark of something I have to similtaneously learn how to grieve and celebrate. One of the things I noted to Jen was how striking that realization actually is given my life today, thinking back on a life that was once dominated by the endless phsyical presence of a social circle, with that memory now ringing out into the uncertain space of this transition into a moment that, by all appearances and experience, now seeks to displace and forget and isolate. Where you know through your convesations with those whom have travelled this space ahead of you, that the process will require a constant process of reckoning with what will become a perpetual stream of loss. In various areas of course, but most pertiently of all the things that once made you “you.”

The notion that this phase of life is marked by the important process of learning how to more appropriately grieve in real time, but also the increased call to remember and to preserve.

These actions, as I’ve been told without the sugar coating, get harder as the years push forward, with life relegating you more and more to the sidelines. At the same time, the call to remember and preserve becomes all the more important precisely because of this reality. As someone once said, words that are lingering today, this is the hard work of aging. Something you are forced to learn in real time, leaning on all the wisdom you have forgotten, handerd down by those who went before. The most difficult thing being your ability to hold on to the simple truth that this process matters to something real and true regarding the meaning of a life.   

To be honest, the only word that fit in that moment, in my conversation with Jen, was “loneliness.” A feeling of lonliness that is also marked by existing in a world that now oeprates in that online space. A world in which my closest lifelong friendships remain marked more by distance than presence, for as valuable as they remain.

Fast forward to after our breakfast, where we attended the Sunday morning service at our Church. Here we were met by a message about the importance of having those voices in your life, the ones that truly know you, which can help you through the passage of time and different phases of a life. How telling the story of a life together matters, especially to how we imagine God’s relationship to this world and our continued participation in it.

That image of the diner, defined as it was through routines built over the passage of time, where those figures knew exactly where to sit without needing direction, where their names were known and orders made before any words had yet been spoken. Such an image pushes back against the dominant image of the way it seems life must work today. A world where we are taught that life is meant to be about some gradual progression towards some non-descript and undefined point of growth. Here, in this image, I find something much richer, preserved as it is in the passage of time, not a product of it. A timely image given the question my day started with, and the message that would follow.

I’ve been thinking about this (now) memory as I’ve been working through the newly released book by Kathryn Jezer-Merton called The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything. It’s a book about understanding this present moment. Which, whether we like it or not, whether we want to recognize it or not, runs straight through one of its primary driving forces- social media. A truism that holds whether you are among those deleting their facebook accounts or perhaps establishing limits and boundaries and reforming habits. “Social media” applies broadly to nearly every facet of our world and its function., far beyond the typical scapegoats. It’s written into the fabric of our econoimy, it’s the primary language of our social function in an online world, and it takes on many different forms.

I found it fascinating to journey with Merton back in time to the early adoption of social media (and I promise to connect this back to my thoughts above on turning 50). Back to the age of MySpace and Friendster and AOL. She outlines the way the early adoption of this form of communication complimented the way life worked before its reshaping. It was a mirror of that (now) lost world. Meaning, it once served as a space largely built for our relatively small physical circle of friends where we could engage in the largely experimental but active creative curation of ones story. Anyone who grew up in this era can understand that these early sites fit our lifetyles at the time, where they demanded the same sort of hours upon hours of time and attention that curating and collecting our tape and CD collections did in a largely still computer iliterate world used to (and loving) “being bored.” Building our MySpace platforms wasn’t that far removed from the practice of building our physical zines or our basement jam session hang outs, and it wasn’t abnormal to find ourselves doing it together either. We would build them, and then we would meet together to discuss and compare and chat about them. More importantly, which Merton points out, the first place we would gravitate to were the profiles.

But then came an important shift in the atmsophere. Where these connecting spaces experienced a movement from a small group of our close friends (our physical life) out into a small group of connections turned friends from outside of that physical circle. This began the gradual progression towards a world framed now through connections marked by physical distance. As this shift became the norm, those once physical spaces began to disappear, along with the once cherished practice of the curation of profiles. Facebook understood where these winds were shifting towards long before anyone else, and eventually that once world of creation curation of our physical lives turned into a world of online connection and content now replicating and chasing after itself. The world was now our collective space, and that space was now online, and every platform that followed became defined by the further implementation of “user friendly” streamlined designs, whicih is shorthand for “stripped of the need for time consuming personal curation.”

And the bigger the world became, the more these physical spaces we once occupied disappeared. Ironically, if you fast foward to some of the eventual fallout, what we eventually find is a world where carving out time for physical interaction (be it with spaces or people, the more predominant trend being towards the former) has now become an intentional trend, the necessary reprieve, the thing we build in to our lives as an antidote to the way the world now works.

A world where going off social media becomes a matter of virtue signalling for a lost world no one actually knows or understands masking the simple fact that even where we engage in such admirable practices of disciplined retreat, the world we occupy remains defined by social media. What’s also true, and maybe even more pertinent, is that this supposed reclamation of physical spaces tends to narrow our world into small, protected circles of like minded connection, not open it up. The lost world we think we are retreaving, in constrast, that was a world once necessitated by a room filled with disagreement by its nature. That’s what made it valuable. .

One of the things Merton brings to the forefront is that the thing (the social construct) that is telling the story of our lives is intimately connected to how we tell the stories of our lives. Meaning, we are always as much a product of the world as we are a product of the way the world functions. The first is the world we inherit, the second determines the paramaters of our participation in it. Within this we can note important and common human tendencies that remain universal across the shifting tides- the need to share of ourselves, the need to belong, the need to preserve. But we also have what we would call the unique dynamics of a particular moment in time, in this case our present online age. Knowing the difference is important.

She does state that this (book) is not about singling out the present online age and demonizing it. Although in some ways it is singling it out so as to understand the thing we are looking to critique (and its relevance to our lives)  Mostly though, it’s about learning how to distinguish between what those inate common human needs are, and the particular shape of our present moment that distinguishes us from the rest of history, a process that is equal parts reflective and predictive.

But there’s an important aspect of our navigation to this end that needs to be recognized. In order to get to the root of the problem we have to understand where it is situated in the history of it’s emergence. For example, we can look at the ways social media changed from that era of hands on curation to the automated forms we encounter today. That begs the question, why did it take this shape? It doesn’t just come out of nowhere. It’s following a pattern. That might push us to look at the nature of the market economy this emerges within, something Morton notes as a force that naturally seeks the commodification of emotional (lived lives) capitalism, something that economy craves in this online world.

But that also doesn’t come out of nowhere. Morton notes how we can reach back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to locate a pivotal shift in a way of doing life in this economic reality, observing the devleopment of the myth of “personal growth” or pesonal development, something that gets applied to telling our stories according to a preconditioned allegiance to expected notions of linear progressions and sought after narratives of self improvement.

But again, this doesn’t come out of nowhere. It is the natural outcome of a particular world of its time, one that follows the myth of progress, or a narrative of societal progression that is built on scapegoating the past. A world that finds its worth in today always necessarily being better than yesterday, lest the whole enterprise show itself to be a failure. Follow that line and we find ourselves, again as an example, standing on the precipice of a new societal shift, now known as the age of the Enlightenment. Itself a product of wide-spread shifts which divided East and West according to the terms old and new, tumbling as it was into the industrial age and everything else that would follow in its footsteps.

Perhaps reaching further back yet, as far back as James Suzman’s theory in Work: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to The Age of Robots (necessary reading), which sees the first truly universal shift in the way we do life with the discovery of fire, the singular moment where activity once the sole property of the active expenditure of human energy was now being contracted out to a different energy source (handing the work we once did to something other than ourselves). Which of course begins the long and patterned road to now grappling with the realities of AI.

All such digging requires us to work our way back up then to those pivotal points that mark our present point of concern, to something closer in relevance and which we can, perhaps, actually have a degree of control over and hold greater proximity to. But we do so with those helpful patternings in mind, which make us better equipped to understand the issues we are facing now, especially for that all important task of distinguishing between the familiar and common patterns that bind history together, and the uniqueness of this present moment.

A present moment marked in a unique way by

• the commodifcation of emotional capitalism
• a globalized world shaped predominantly by this seperation between digital and physical spaces
• widespread epidemics of depression and anxiety fueled by the erosion of the attention economy
• Increasing feelings and experiences of loneliness and a loss of a guiding narrative

Morton notes another important, and I think profound, observation. At the heart of the problem sits this essential idea: what we’ve lost is the basic vocabulary for describing, and thus knowing, the world before this present shift from physical space to the new online world (and the economic machine it would bear out in its image). That’s massively important for understanding where we find ourselves in this present moment. All narrative is, after allo, predicated on language. And not just language, but a shared language.

There is a reason why this matters though for how we understand this present moment. When you look at the patterns of history, what you find is a human tendency towards forms of dualism. Dualism is simply a way of seeing a world (or a facet of reality) as being made up of two distinct, seperate parts. Platonism is perhaps one of the most famous expressions of dualistic thought, and comes in and out of fashion like the 80s and 90s (also see the obsession of the West with retrieving ancient Greek Myth and reappropriating it, along with it’s infused dualism, as our latest iteration of a modern western origins story). These same patterns emerge when we look at our now online world seeking repreieve in the physical. Rather than acting as a critique of the online world, we create these dualistic realities, such as the world of nature versus the digital world of our now functional lives (or nature versus the city). More specific to the above analyszis is the tendency to carve out spaces and sections of our lives dedicated to physical space that are effectively seperate from the world we occupy in the online space.

Debate surrounding dualism looms large, especially where it intersects with our preservation of the modern western myth of progress, but critiques have long accused it of falsely writing reality into narratives of disparate parts. Such ways of thinking not only keeps us at arms length from attending to the way reality is on a more holistic level, it actively allows us to ignore it. Such critiques see it as enabling forms of escapism, which then sacfiice our ability to hone in on what actually matters when it comes to assessing a true narrative of the world we are inhabiting. Carving out wanted repreives doesn’t pose the necessary quesitons needed to actively address the online world we still inhabit.

And subsequently, it fails to pose those same questions to the unique challenges such a world represents: the loneliness epidemic, the challenges of widespread and systemic depression and anxiety, the erosion of the attention economy, the lack of narrative.

Coming back full circle to my restaurant experience and my struggle with turning 50 in a world that increasingly feels unfamiliar, but one which also no longer speaks my language. Being of that generation, the last suriving one which has one foot in both worlds, who grew up without the internet, but came of age in the great shift towards this online existence., in some ways makes it more difficult. It’s not simply that I feel the impact of such a world, it’s that I actively know what has been lost over the years. I also know that what is lost is part of a world that no longer exists, a world that “today” doesn’t have the language for. This, I think, is part of why the process of aging in a world where change happens at a rate which is unprecedented, brings with it those ineviatble feelings of growing isolation and loneliness. Attempting to communicate these parts of oursevles in a world that neither understands you nor cares to (or perhaps is able to) only serves to underscore the predominant narrative that relegates lives to the very past the myth of progress sees as the enemy. In some ways this has been true for a good long while about the ebb and flow of generational shifts, but to understand the challenges of aging today one also needs to note its unique expression in this now online world.

In truth, I don’t know that my generation fully grasped what it was getting into. We were taking our own journey into something we did not understand, and what has come from it is a world we no longer understand. A world so reshaped that it cannot recognize its own shadow, even in proper conversation. And yet it is also our world nonetheless. We, those of us who are aged, still live in it. Still occupy it. Still have to navigate it. Which is part of the challenge of that never ending grieving process, because the more we do, the more distanced we become from our mother tongue so to spaeak. The more the memory of the world we grew up in fades and retreats with the passage of time, and the more we become convinced of that ever repeating narrative: the past exists only to assure we have rejected it. Only now it’s as if the past never existed at all. In many ways, modern history is not history at all. In the online world it cannot be lost, it cannot be buried, and it will never need to be sought or wrestled with or understood. This is part of that vast language barrier that keeps these two worlds apart.

Here’s something interesting. Today I went to visit the Dalnavert Museum, the once home of John A. Macdonald, a former Prime Minister of Canada. While I was working my way through the old home, built in the late 1800’s, one of the workers asked me how I was enjoying the displays. The first thought I had was, if you took this home, cut it down to less than a quarter of its size, and took out some of the more lofty artifacts denoting that upper class status, the whole thing reminded me of being a young child visiting my grandmothers house. So many of the artifacts were exactly the things that they had in their home, from the old style washers and tub to the kitchen stove and pots, to the wallpaper and lamps. It all tbrought me straight back to those childhood memories. But it also struck me that, here I was seperated by two generations from that life, and my world can still share that language. in my ways. Being seperated now (in some respects) by two generations on the other side (given the rate of change, two generations between my grandpaterents and me translates to about 5 between me and and my nephews children) leaves me with a world that seems to share next to nothing in common. Case in point: I was teaching a confirmation class a little while ago, and in my lesson I brought up what I thought was the single generation occupying of that room- Gen Z. Turned out the room was actually divided by two whole generations, defined as such while only being a year apart. More shocking? Both sides stated that they really didn’t understand the other. They felt like they spoke a completely different language. That really shook me up.

Back to that breakfast outing. Somehow that simple act of eating breakfast in a long standing diner surrounded by visible acts of routine and tradition reminded me that certain revelations do break through the noise from time to time. A lost art? Perhaps. A dying relic in an age where such institutions only survive by changing names every four or fives years.? There’ a good chance this is true. For me it wasn’t so much about it being some ill fated reverance for the good old days (not that this isn’t part of it I assume for anyone remembering the past), rather it was a moment when I felt known., and understood. As though this shared language had the power to remind me that the past is still a thing. That life does indeed matter. That its not just an inevitable (and often tough) dance towards the reality of being erased. Or worse yet, living in a world where one has already been erased. After all, such discussions about a life are never contained to a single story. As Morton’s title denotes, its about “our” stories. It always has been. How we grapple with the relevance of the past in the face of this new online world impacts the whole. What we find the world saying about us, is precisely what allows us to say something about the world. This is why it matters. Perhaps then, this is precisely why figuring out, in this new phase of life, how to grieve and preserve at the same time matters as well. 

Every once in a while I unearth something from my childhood years that I forgot existed. I have no idea where this small remnant of a story was going, but it’s something I was starting to write back when, my best guess, I was around 10 or 12 years old. Figured I’d type it out and preserve it here:

(This was the working chapter title I assume?) Horrendous Yet Familiar

The town of Heradrin, located in the highlands of greater Mirlanda, was filled with the noise and excitment of hundreds of people, all out having a good time and enjoying the festivities of the Christmas season. A couple of houses sat at the edge of town lighting up the outskirts. One of these houses was owned by the Halworth family. Their house was located by a long dirt road serving as the main way to get in and out of town. Their house was old and run down, but that didn’t matter to the Halworths. They considered it home, and had worked hard to make it into a place where they could build a life.

The house was made up of two rooms. In the smaller of the two, Mrs. Halworth lay on her bed, her long blonde hair falling over the sides of her slender shoulders. She was in such a heavy sleep that a trumpet being blared in her ear couldn’t have woken her. One door down her two young girls, both 2 years apart but with similar feisty personalities, were stirring with restlessness as they awaited the coming dawn.  In the other room a shabbily dressed 14 year old boy named Edward sat at a warped and faded wooden desk staring intently down at two thick books that lay open on the desk in front of him. On the open page of one of the books there was written an ancient legend. The legend starts with a man named Gilbert A. Walworth,, who lived way back during the time of the Great Awakening. It told of a long lost treasure that was buried deep in the farthest depths of these legendary caves, known to the locals as the Caves of Death.

Everyone in the town of Heradrin knew about these caves. They were located just a 45 minute drive northward. They also knew of the cave’s protecter, a mysterious fire breathing dragon that lurked deep within the cavernous underground lakes. This dragon, as the story goes, keeps watch over the treasure. Many desire it, but all who venture to find it meet with death. Save for one. This is the one the legend remembers.

It is a town tradition to share the story at Christmas time of this man named Gilbert A. Walworth. As the story goes, Walworth was a man who once coveted untold riches, and upon discovering this map to the promised treasure he sacrificed everything he owned and loved to attain it. Determined to succeed and believing these riches would give him everything he desired, he eventually found himself lost in this cave and unable to find his way back out. Having disappeared for years, the towns-people assumed his death. Until one day, a Chistmas day not unlike this one, they saw this shadowy, weathered figure making his way down the road. Walworth had returned.

In the days that followed he would tell of his experience, describing his perilous journey deep into the darkness of these passageways, eventually one day coming upon a great expanse overlooking an underground lake. Here he found a treasure not made of gold, but of Wisdom. Angry about his findings, Walworth threw this treasure into the lake, thus awakening the great beast that lay sleeping beneath the surface. The beast was the most fearsome thing he had ever seen, with fangs as wide and as tall as he stood, and fiery red eyes that pierced staight into his soul. A body made of scales that glistened as though it was made of prized medals. Frozen in place, he prayed for deliverance, which is when he found himself suddenly subsumed by a glowing light, with an unfamiliar voice seemingly speaking from all sides all once. Here he was imparted with a choice. Desire the secrets of this Wisdom and these riches would serve as the true master of his heart, freeing him from the passions of his will and giving him an untold power over the forces of the world. Choose the passions, and he would become a slave to the dragon, giving him the untold powers of the world.

Walworth chose Wisdom, and upon his return he began to seek the gift that, for him, had become his salvation. For the rest of his days he grew more and more to love this Wisdom, giving him a power greater than anything he could have imagined, spilling out into the lives he surrounded, and over the years his renknown began to spread over the lands, forming into the greatest legend Herardrin has ever known. Eventually he would die, the secrets of his Wisdom being buried with his body where one day such riches might be unearthed by another, but ever since the people of the town came to believe that by telling this story each year, the mystery could be preserved. That in the telling it they might continue to experience and seek its power. As the legend goes, for those who’s hearts are guarded, the treasure of the dragon remains their desire. For those who journey to find this treasure, they are faced given this same choice. Apart from Walworth, no one else who has entered has returned to share their story. Thus, the sharing of this story year after year has been a way of protecting the town from the allure of the caves.

“Even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, (it) continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it.”(page 57, This Homeward Ache))

The “it” in this equation is Sehnsucht. Sehnsucht, a German word that Lewis cites in his autobiography as a defining point in his own spiritual journey, and which Amy Balk Lee describes in her book This Homeward Ache: How Our Yearning for the Life to Come Spurs on Our Life Today, as being notoriously prone to being subsumed by other words. Yet, “the essence” of this word is one that, by its nature, “can’t really be translated.” She goes on to cite Rebecca K. Reynolds’s work in trying to unpack a strong sense of its meaning, rooting it in a feeling that one can’t quite explain, either to oneself or to others. It is defined as, “A yearning that floats always in the peripheral vision of your soul, but which disappears every time you turn and try to look at it,” something that lends it a necessary part of its very quality and charachter. It is a word that is most at home in the mundane struggles of life, describing that basic human of an unnamed longing for a far-off land we have never seen, or a place we cannot name. (page 41)

Lee suggests this basic truism about how life works, which is that our human biological function, regardless of the beliefs that undergird our interpretation of it, actively protects us against being stuck in a perpetual state of longing. This might feel intuitive, but it’s not always obvious or recognized as we make our way through this life.

The science behind this basic truth of human function suggests that such perpetual longing connects to a further discussion of the nature of human (or creaturely) desire, and more importantly how this relates to the brain’s consistent mode of formulating predictions based on the world it is encountering. What this establishes is, this predictive function is not merely responding to dangers and rewards that are right in front of us, as though this is a simple call and response exercise dependent on what it sees, rather it appears that there is a fundamental need for our brains to seek something it cannot see and cannot name. This is why the concept of hope remains so central to the human experience. As humans, this is what our brains are (unconsciously) fighting to preserve. Without this we become enslaved to what the science could call “dysfunction” or “disorder,” which can take on many different forms. One of its most accute forms on the mental side of things would be things like anxiety, depression, and stress, and its ultimate shape melancholy, cynicism, and apathy.

Lee also cites Alan Jacobs here, saying that while we (our biological brains) do not want to be caught in a perpetual state of longing, we do want to experience joy (as an example). Lee cites this in underscoring C.S. Lewis’ own basic translation of Sehnsucht as Joy. In fact, this is at the core of nearly every spiritual practice, this idea that there is a key difference between fulfilled longings and our experience of Joy in the face of unfulfilled longings.

Here is what this seems to reveal. While our brains are wired to protect against it, this basic fact of Sehnsucht suggests that we are in fact in a perpetual state of longing. However, the crisis point, the thing our brains are responding to, hinges not on the present lack of fulfillment but rather on whether we believe the source of this longing to be true and to actually exist. This is where hope is derived from.

The real question then appears to come down to this basic idea. If it is true that Sehnsucht cannot be grasped or explained, what actually matters is a two-fold reality: first, the idea that we live according to a deeply held belief that it exists at all, and second, what this reveals about why such a thing matters in the first place.

There is a simple, utilitarian understanding of this two-fold equation. It would say, based on reducing the experience to its material parts, that the science tells us this essential human experience is the brain creating the illusion of hope, and subsequently the illusion of joy. These become necessary in order for a human to live in a world shaped by unfulfilled longings. It is, in many ways, described in terms that attach to that essential drive for survival that we find in nature itself, and in fact, nearly everything I’ve read to this end inevitably locates this within a larger section discussing the biological roots of this very drive.

In this case, the appeal to such illusions, especially once you get into the philosophers, is what then moves us from the biological grounds to the metaphysical discussion. What’s important to note here is, such ways of explaining this longing aren’t looking to strip it of its meaning, rather it is naming what that source actually is. Here, the most common move is to appeal to complexity as a sort of authority in and of itself, meaning, these illusions are built on (or are a product of) these emergent realities we call the essential human experience. This is the complexity from which we then derive our meaning. In this sense, we can speak of these illusions as a real thing, even while they are being defined as something that does not in fact exist. .

This is typically the point where this discussion finds its pushback. On one hand, Sehnsucht is comfortably positioned as something that both exists and does not exist at the same time. Complexity allows us to say, it is a true part of the human experience, and thus we can say it is meaningful. But its meaning derives from a Sehnsucht that points to something very different than that experience. Thus Sehnsucht is simply a way of naming a biological function in ways that accord with the illusion. Whether we can hold the obvious cognitive disonnance without losing our sense of hope is not the real question for such interpretations (at least from what I’ve seen), rather it is simply about whether we experience the benefits of these illusions or not. Which is where Joy, or its superficial and largely ill defined version, happiness, comes into play.

On the other hand, those who critique the coherency of this position tend to suggest that such interpretations do not have a particularly strong explanatory power when it comes to actually making sense of the human experience itself, or more accurately the world we oberve and experience. It is not simply cognitive disonnance at play, there is in fact far more at stake when it comes to why we appear to need such beliefs in the first place. One need not look any further than a life for whom hope has been challenged or even abolished. What is at stake is what we actually believe to be true about the world we observe and experience. In this case, the only way we can trust Joy is by believing it exists apart from the ebb and flow of this world we are experiencing. Otherwise it all is held captive to circumstance.

Now, it’s important to note here that, this is not an apologetic. This is not a proof argument. Rather, it is a way of attending to both the way things actually are, and how that relates to what we actually believe about this world we are inhabiting. Whether these things can be stated to have any inherent value, it seeks honesty and integrity in the relationship between these two things.

There are two other important elements here that Lee brings to the table. The first is the hard relationship between a world that bears witness to both the infinite and the finite. This is what motivated minds like Einstein to pursue their theories about existence. Which is to say, when it comes to Sehnsucht, the finite does not have the power to explain the whole. Again, we know this intuitively, but we don’t always give this basic fact about the world we observe and experience the attention it deserves. If this is the case, that we have these longings at all must be set in conversation with the infinite. The quality of these longsings suggest that we are seperated from something we don’t yet know and can’t yet see. Whether this is something our minds of “illusioned,” or whether it is something that exists, in both cases this points to something outside of ourselves. And not just outside of ourselves, but something that is beyond the very words we use to explain it. In both cases, Joy can only translate Sehsucht if Sehsucht is not held captive to our experience of Joy. It is the same for another word we often employ in service of making sense of that which cannot be known or seen: beauty. Lee writes,

“Sehnsucht is not found in but beyond beauty.”

To think otherwise is to be betrayed by something that never existed in the first place. This is the existential crisis. We can only trust beauty if it points beyond itself to its source. In the same way in which metaphor, for it to have power, must point beyond itself.

There is a second important aspect of this discussion though that Lee addresses, and that is the idea of nostalgia. Nostalgia often suffers from superficial readings and definitions in our modern day, but at its richest, Lee suggest that nostalgia is a “heartache for the homecoming,” or a “homecoming pain.”  Yes, it is a longing for a setting in the past, but where Sehnsucht reveals the source of this longing it “catches nostalgia and directs it toward something more fulfilling and complete, something of which the former time gave only a hint.”

What the experience of nostalgia reveals is that our longing has always been rooted in a sense of an inhabited space. Not some disembodied future but an incarnated reality. We aren’t longing for a past that is now gone, rather we are longing for the very same thing this past is bearing witness to in its memory. If this space is in fact a product of our brain’s creation of these necessary illusions, this sense of inhabiting an unnamed Home nevertheless still defines the shape of this longing. This is the only way our brains could convince us (a slippery word in this regard) that such a hope is true and trustworthy.  And if it’s true? If this Home does exist? Here is where we glimpse its true shape.

Sehnsucht is always with us. It is an integral part of the human experience. To live with that “homeward longing,” is to live with a certain hope that Senhsucht is in fact something we can trust. We can trust it enough to stake our very lives on it, as all humans do. We call these “beliefs.” Behind every human experience, be it experiences of joy, sadness, sorrow, beauty, awe, empathy, pain, love; behind each of these things is an underlying belief about the world we observe and experience, and a deep rooted trust in that belief. That is what allows us to experience these things. Not only this, but behind every human experience is this same witness to Sehnsucht, a world (and word) we cannot see and cannot expalin, but which drives our longings, even as we know they will remain unfulfilled. Here in lies our hope.

Only fitting that a train (among other) disruptions would go on to define the final part of my pilgrimage. It begins with my shuttle from Stonehenge back to Salisbury Station, where I would complete the final leg of my journey over to Oxford, being an hour late. This required changing my train ticket to a later time, at which point I accidentally clicked on the right day, just on the wrong week, inadvertently booking my train for precisely a week later than the time I needed to leave, and which also then charged me for the price of a new ticket when it wasn’t supposed to.

Which led to me making the wrong decision to speak to the station agent about the mistake rather than trying to go through the third party app (Trainline). Turns out when the train station adjusts a ticket purchased through a third party app, it becomes impossible to correct the mistake or get a refund, with both parties punting the responsiblity back to the other in an effort to absolve themselves of any responsibility or decision.

Should have just rented that car.

Which meant I payed three times over for the same ticket. On top of this, the train also ended up being disrupted.

In all of that, being rerouted provided me with a fresh dilemma. The town of Woking had been on my list, being the hometown of H.G. Wells. As things go, other things took priority and it gradually ended up being taken out of the potential plans. Being re-routed, I now had an opportunity to do a short layover in Woking before continuing on to Oxford. I took the opportunity, partly because I was already missing my window of opportunity to arrive in Oxford before the college grounds closed their doors, and because my father in law was a big fan of H.G. Wells. I figured I could document the place and find him a souvenir. I couldn’t find a souvenir, but I did document the place, seeing his home, the bridge, the location of the martian landing (Horsell Common), the martian tripod sculpture in Crown Square, the memorial statues, the murals (all marked by the heritage trail). I added that to my list of blue plaques from London (including a 5,000 square foot townhouse at Regent Park where he died, which I found out was listed 5 years ago for 13.95 million pounds).

While I didn’t have an accompanying book to fill in his story, Wells’ name popped up so often in association with the others I was visiting that it seemed fitting to be able to work him in to the picture. In either case, given everything that happened just to finally get on that train, I was relieved to be on route and ultimately heading to my primary destination: Oxford.

Grieving the loss of that opportunity to fully experience the college grounds of Tolkien, Carroll and Lewis, I set out to make the most of my experience. In what I felt was a stroke of genius at the time, I was able to book a ticket for a 1:00 am train, which would then take me to Reading where I could transfer to a bus heading to Heathrow for what was an early morning flight. This both extended my stay in Oxford, while also putting me in transport for a fair portion of the night (as opposed to wandering the streets). There I could relax and have a place to store my luggage (which was now missing a whole wheel).

A stroke of genuis until the bus ended up being cancelled. But I digress.

My time in Oxford would be framed by two graves (Tolkien on the front end, Lewis on the back end, being located at opposite ends up the city), with a visit to St. Mary’s Passage to see the famous Narnia door anchoring the middle of what was a tour around the outskirts of Magdalen College, the (under construction) Eagle and Child, getting to stand at the foot of Christ Church where Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) lived and worked (and the Meadows that were his inspiration),  Alice’s Shop (the 15th century grocery store that the real life inspiration for Alice frequented), getting to stand at the doors of  the Church of St. Mary’s where Lewis preached the sermon The Weight of Glory, and taking a cab ride out to the gravesite of Lewis and the Kilns/nature reserve (where Lewis wrote his books).

In all of that, perhaps the most profound moment for me was simply sitting on a bench along the river, close by St. Mary’s Passage, with N.T. Wright’s newest, God’s Homecoming, in hand. A formative voice in my life, and a resident of Oxford, I was able to imagine being surrounded by all those who walked these same streets: Tolkien, Lewis, Carroll, Susan Cooper, and the still living author Stephen Lawhead, with Wright’s reminder of this relationship between the spaces we call home in this world and the great promise of God’s coming to dwell amongst it, reminding me of how all these stories speak to the hope of transformation. All of this converging on these very grounds. Here is where my childhood stories truly come alive, dancing as they are in my imagination under the now moonlit skies, all being brought in line with an important turn in my own theological understanding all these years later.

Having come all this way, I am able to look back on this pilgrimage and consider it through the lens of that cosmic story, the same one that informed each of these voices now standing in front of me. The Story that carries us all, making sense  of the very human joys and struggles all our stories represent. I have noted this along the way, but it feels to me to be a profound thought to consider, each of these voices reflect a part of a much larger conversation, one that flows directly from their communion with one another and which points to the world they both experienced and observed right in front of them. One of the reasons the Inklings themselves remain so present in my own imagination is because here, at this very point in history, I also find the buried remnants of my own past. A past when I once understood and knew what this sort of communion was, and occupied a world in which it was still possible. Here, in the lives of these literary voices, is this rare moment where divergent voices converge in this singular space working to preserve the lost art of discourse and debate. Friendships that see in their differences a window into the most important questions that all our lives are asking through our acts of living. A people for whom every conversation is, by its nature, of utmost importance. Where every discussion, big or small, is seen as a life and death matter. Discouirse that shared equal space with the simple joys of laughter and celebration which informed their life together around the table at the same time.

As Michael D.C Drout suggests in his masterful book The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R Tolkiens Creation, in taking stock of the textual and literary criticism of Tolkien’s body of work and creations, it simply does not do to reduce it to just another entry into what were the common genre writings of his time. This does not have the power to explain why these stories mattered, and indeed continue to matter. Applying this to the whole of this community of writers shaping the character of England at this time, these stories do indeed represent a particular resonant force in history that seems unique and rare, and to dig into Tolkien’s world brings us into a more rational conversation about why this is. This moment in time represents a convergence of disparate feelings in what were the shifting tides of history on a meta level. This is why these stories continue to speak today, because they bring an important conversation about this intersection of worldviews to the forefront. The present shape of our own political realities, finding their own sorts of shifting tides in a more micro fashion, belongs to the larger narrative that this collection of literary voices both capture and preserve. It is their critique of modernism that becomes the necessary tool for understanding how we arrive where we are today. It was their ability to take the stories of the old world and carve out a conversation with the new that gives us the lens through which to see the revelance of appealing to and reclaiming the notion of it all belonging to a larger Story.

And I have become convinced at this point in my pilgrimage that one of the key factors that enabled this unique moment to emerge was the communion that these literary voices shared with one another. In our now global world, we simply do not find this at work today. The communion that inspired them to find their inspiration in one another’s creative work, as though the creative act itself needed this ongoing collaborative process, is a lost art, given now to a more superficial prioritizing of ideological divides. The richness of the symbols that ring out over these ancient grounds, indeed representing a lost language, contrasts heavily with the tendency today to write modern morality tales, bent as they are towards our obsession with utilitarian definitions, symbols and metaphors left swimming around without an actual anchor. Narratives that no longer seek revelation or the uncovering of mystery, but rather the continued deconstruction of these things in favour of a world built on facts and propositions. Where the need for our stories to wrestle with and acknolwedge the weight of our existential questions through story has come to be seen as inferior academics, traded for a tendency, in its endless ebb and flow, for grabbing on to older patterns of deifying a natural world that has similtaneously been reduced to our arguments for a robust physicalism and material reality, both in and outside of our modern religious systems. An act that sits uncomfortably alongside an equal commitment to its reigning humanist assumptions. This has become the shared language of our day, only, as Mircea Eliade once so brilliantly put it in the book The Sacred and the Profane, such language has little explanatory power when it comes to making sense of actual human experience and observance of the world.

Of course there are great stories still being told, great storytellers still telling them. What I think this pilgrimage is opening up for me though is that we’ve lost the ability to articulate why these stories have the power that they do. Not unlike my own act of growing up out of the juvenile nature of my childhood self, the world now sees itself as having grown up out of its old world superstitions.

Thus, to recover my childhood stories, to encounter them in their world, becomes an act, for me, of learning what it means to grow into my childhood, not to stand above it. Here this process reaches into the most fundamental of all my questions: why do we tell stories in the first place. What draws us to its apparent power. What allows this to endure.

And even more important, what world do these stories reveal and how do we inhabit such a world.

My generation, existing as we did in a world both before and after the internet became a thing, is often described as being the last of the living voices whom know what it is to exist in both worlds. We are in fact prone to thinking in terms of this liminal space (there are genuine studies demonstrating this), holding both worlds together even when we don’t realize it. One of the great vantage points this provides is seeing the ways in which the myth of progress, the central and guiding narrative of the new world, works to reshape the world. This hands us a certain conundrum. We are tasked with adopting the ways of the new world while knowing what has been lost in the erasure of the old. We can see firsthand the ways in which we are shaped by the world we’ve been handed, and we can also see how this foreward movement works, built on a constant demand to reject the past and valourize an unnamed future, which as I said in my previous reflections actively works to judge and erase the relevance of our present.

To have the world after the internet bury the old world in its wake is to feel the myth of progress actively working to throw the very value of these things into question. The only value that remains is the constant rejection of our past.

This basic awareness is, in its own way, a kind of fervent, perpetual existential crisis, and whether we feel it or pay attention to it or ignore it, its there. For those of us who watched the world change right in front of us in real time, it’s imbedded in the way we participate in the new world. No single generation since has experienced the same kind of transition. Even the present dialogue around AI must reach back to that old world in order to make sense of its inherent crisis and wanted anxieties.

Sitting on that bench, thinking about these figures that played such a formative part in my own childhood, I realized that the basic shape of this unique generational vantage point mirrors the shape of this literary community, having one foot in the old world of a now dying Empire, and one foot in the new world of a rising one. One foot in a world on either side of a world shaping war. One could argue, no generation since has that same vantage point. This is what makes it unique.

In many ways then, this journey into my childhood stories was about recovering a lost language. Or perhaps it was about learning how to speak all over again. Voices which once taught me how to read the world, how to ask my questions, are the very ones my adult self would grow to rebel against. Here the new world taught me that the true point was learning how to grow up out of those childhood stories, that life is defined by our constant and necessary rejection of the past, and that our greatest tool to this end was science, and the only true explanatory narrative the myth of progress.

I recognized something here in my journaling. I knew what it was to be taught by the world to be angry at my upbringing, to be mad at the ways it indoctrinated me into its old ways of thinking, to blame religion for all of the worlds shortcomings. I knew this well. I also knew the ways in which a whole generation, not content to toss away those old stories (or unable to do so), came to be defined by a wanted acceptance of this anger, trading the old critiques of these shifting worldviews for a targeted embrace. Where everything becomes metaphor, and subsequent questions about and any challenging of what these metaphors are in fact rooted in becomes taboo and intollerant. 

What I recognized was, both of these ways of approaching the world had left me feeling equally unable to speak for a long, long time. The outright confusion of being taught to be angry about such indoctrination on one hand, but having no recourse for expressing what it was to feel lied to by the other side as well. Try to speak and it becomes an exercise of being saddled in with one side or the other as part of this same inevitable game of modern apologetics. 

Maybe the worst part of this is feeling like, for so long I’ve carried this sense that not only is there no recourse, there’s not even the shared language needed to communicate these feelings, for explaining what this space that I am occupying actually is. Which is perhaps why, encountering a shared language in these litearary voices feels so incredibly liberating. To enter into a space that seems like it would feel equally out of place in the world I described above is something I have so desperately been craving. Here I am allowed to speak. I am allowed to leave my anger behind. I am in the company of others whom understand, and whom intimately communicated these feelings through their writings. They believed that story finds its power precisely in the way it reveals a world that is both beyond us and right in front of us. They shared the restlessness of my childhood questions, and saw it not as something I needed to grow out of, but as something I needed to learn how to embrace and to know more intimately. That such an exercise is not anti-intellectual or a less than academic exercise, but rather the most rational venture we can embark on.

Here, in the safety of this place, I am free to pursue a full knowledge of this world as it is. I am free to embark on the quest that was set out before me all those years before: that invitation to remember. 

“We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” (T.S. Eliot)

With my bus being cancelled, I utltimately found myself being rerouted straight to Paddington Station, where I now find myself waiting for the first early morning express train to Heathrow. Indeed, arriving back where I started. It’s a neat experience, getting to watch this space go through what, for it, is a routine process of this transition between the final train of the night and its first morning departure. The quiet, gentle and methodical nature by which the noise begins to disipate, the lights, however briefly, get turned off, and the cleaners move about doing their thing. And then the slow, gradual process by which the lights come back on and the first travellers start to arrive, indicating the beginnning of another day. A dance that happens with the distant clues of those first glimmers of the morning sun sneaking their way in, letting us know that this brief moment of reprieve is readying for a new day. A cycle that I know will be repeated when that sun goes down, and yet here I get to witness it for this one, single, unique moment.

The simplye rhythms of a life, the life of this space, particpating as on ongoing act of creation. A space that is now far more familiar than the one I first encounterd upon my arrival.

Soon I will be stepping on that train and eventually boarding my plane to return home. Where those similar rhythms are waiting to be re-established in my own city, my own home, my own place of work. And yet I return to these spaces a different person. I return with this pilgrimage, this quest, now a permanent part of me, shaping the memory of who I was against the revelations this act of exploration sought to bring about. This is not progress, but transformation. An act of becoming. And what I am bringing with me into these familiar rhythms is a deep rooted sense that this act of becoming is in fact an act of growing into my childhood, not against it. This has always been the case.

Perhaps it is the case that I have never in fact felt closer to who I actually am than when I was that young kid encountering these stories for the first time. Aware of all the complicated feelings and emotions, carrying the raw struggles of simply learning what it means to exist in this world, and trying to figure out what this world is. And yet, the wonder of my adult self is that it gets to grow in its knowledge of what this is. That is the thing, I think, these authors understood, in an age where we didn’t draw the same lines between childrens stories and adult ones. These were stories that transcended such distinctions. Stories that we are meant to reencounter at every turn of our lives, asking the same questions simply from a different vantage point. That is how and why they endure.

As the sun comes up on the final full day of my literary pilgrimage, I find myself climbing the hill to the heart of the ancient city of Exeter. Knowing this was the central hub for all trains travelling in any direction, be it west to Cornwall, South to the Salisbury Plains, East to London, or North to Wales and the Dales, I decided to utilize the split ticket option and stop for an early breakfast before continuing on my way to Stonehenge.

The city is known for containing the Exeter Book, the, to quote, “largest surviving poetry anthology from the Anglo-Saxon era (970 AD).” Maybe slightly less well known is that this is the birthplace of Penguin Books (1934), being designated today as a UNESCO City of Literature.

Just for kicks, it’s also home (Powderham Castle) to the Courtenay family, whom I’m fairly certain has no ties to my own Courtney line (we come from a different Irish root of the similar sounding namesake), but hey, let ones imagination run wild when such encounters call for it.

Fun fact: it’s also home to the first independent library and first woman librarian. And, for that matter, the early suffrage activist Mary Willcocks.

Another fun fact: this is where Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the Book of Were-Wolves and Morgery of Quether, one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (this is where the character Jonathan Harker comes from). It’s also where Bram Stoker’s brother (George) is buried.

Michael Morpurgo (War Horse), Philip Reeve (The Exeter Riddles), Thomas Hardy (The Woodlands), Gene Kemp (The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler). This city, nestled in an area called Devon, was where the writers of Englands literary history came to study and develop their craft (including Charles Dickens). Standing in the train station (the Exeter St. Davids station) is the Penguin vending machine, a reference to Sir Allen Lane (the founder of the publishing imprint, whom came up with the idea of Penguin books while waiting at this very station following a meeting with Agatha Christie)

If all of that sounds like a wikipedia page full of information, it is in fact my jotted notes I took while I was preparing for the trip. The stuff that connects me to the very roads I’m walking and their relevance to my childhood stories. My interests here, though, also spill out from Exeter into the surrounding area. When my plans had still involved a rented car, my carved path to Tintagel/Torquay was a stop at Mevagissey, the setting for Susan Cooper’s Over Sea, Under Stone, through Dartmoor National Park, the inspiration for and featuring the different locations of the plot for Doyle’s The Hounds of Baskerville, and my carved path from Torquay, running through Exeter was the northern edges of Exmoor National Park, the place where Coleridge wrote The Mariner and the start of a 50 mile stretch celebrating his life and works.

Exeter would be the closest I would get to the convergence of these stories (with the exception of the train being 6 miles out from Mevagissey), my train ride taking me mostly around the edges of these places. One of the things that struck me here at Exeter, a thought that I had been carrying with me ever since leaving London, is just how interconnected these literary voices actually were. It’s as much the case that one would be tracking down the heritage of a single voice, as doing so places you in these meeting points of what was a larger community of voices. These stories reflect an active and ongoing conversation, each of them tied to one another. They didn’t all get along. They disagreed, they had spirited debates. But they all shared a similar passion, and, as I have been discovering through these stories, a similar interest in critiquing the present shape of the world they had been handed and thus inhabited. They have become models for me in doing just this in the world I have been handed and am called to inhabit.

In many ways Exeter would be a symblic bookend anchoring the journey ahead of me leading towards Oxford. Oxford too would become a place where this community of voices comes most alive for me in both spirit and consciousness.

Also, it’s here that I finally solved the puzzle of what an English flapjack is. Yes, I know I could have googled it. And no, it’s not a pancake like it is in America, which was my only previous association with the name. Also yes, it’s quite delicious, cheap (you’re always most conscious of your spiralling budget on the latter end of a trip, right?), and often (or always?) gluten free, Glad I tried it once before I left.

Before leaving Exeter I stop at Sainsbury’s for a budget lunch option. Pro-tip (which I am absolutely not- it’s the tip I got from the pros): the grab (or take) and go meal options, which are everywhere precisely because this grocer is everywhere, are your go to option for $5 dollar (or a fiver) breakfast/lunch options. They are fresh, good, and come with an extensive enough variety to not become tired or repetitive. Burrito in hand (or in my bag), with a side of crisps and sparkly water of course, I begin the rest of my trek to Salsibury Station, where I will be catching a shuttle over to Stonehenge.

Here I will look out my train window to the north and begin to imagine what my limited time has relegated to a potential future part 2 of this pilgrimage. I have already started putting the pieces together as I’ve gone along in fact, including some things that rerouted plans caused me to miss, and as well the unoffical completing of my literary tour of the British Isles. The tour to Canterbury and Dover Castle would be one thing I’d love to do on the other side of London, but the central starting point for me would be to complete my tour of the King Arthur landscape, simply from a different starting point: Glastonbury, the legendary isle of Avalon where we find the end of Arthur’s tale. It’s here where you find the famed countryside of Camelot. Symbolically however, this is an entry point into Wales, where the impassioned debate over Arthur’s true origins still persists. My journey, should I be able to return, would begin here, before moving up into Wales with its own rich history relating to these old stories (this is also where we find other locations of Susan Coopers novels), from Wales to Birmingham, to complete my tour of Tolkien, and from Birmingham to the Lake District to complete my pilgrimage through my childhood stories with a visit to Beatrix Potter’s hometown and inspiraiton. From there I would cross the waters to Ireland to fully connect the two lines of my family tree.

But thus is the restless mind of wanderlust. Here I am, my imagination being pulled back from that norther view and future planning, suddenly realizing I am now in Salisbury. At which point I panic, because I can’t remember which end of the car I left my luggage on. With the doors opening, I of course choose the wrong end, only to run like a madman to the other, promptly grabbing the wrong bag. More panic ensues, and a mad dash back inside the car, where I hand the now startled and frazzled owner their bag and grab the right one.

Gotta love train travel. Yelling into the void for the train to wait isn’t going to keep those doors from shutting.

Stonehenge

Of the handful of sites which have existed in my minds eye ever since I was a kid, this would be near the top. Nothing broke open my imagination like the story of these stones, most recently occupying the heart of one of my favorite series from my favorite authors (the Bright Empire series by Stephen Lawhead). I loved the way they symbolized that ongoing conversation about the relationship between the spiritual and material natures of this world which we occupy. The enduring mystery that historicists love to claim they’ve gotten close to solving in their desire to reduce it to material terms, and the work of others in preserving the myth that gives the place its sacred grounding. Here reality, and the clash of these particular worldviews, gets broken wide open, at least for me. I haven’t even boarded the final shuttle and I can already feel the excitment and anticipation of a good 43 years worth of fascination coming to a head.

The “it’s just a pile of rocks” people be damned (apoologies for the crassness). To view it that way is to fail to see the simple power of occupying a space: a grave, a monument, the endless plaques preserving the history of London as a living thing. In truth, everything can be reduced to “a pile of rocks” in this approach. Here, in this moment, this is about why this space, this place, matters to the larger Story.

In preparation, although I have been consuming material on the place since I was likely 7 years of age, I chose Aubrey Burl’s Stonhenge: A Complete History. It’s a wonderfully balanced book (unlike Ken Follet’s horid recent work of historical fiction), seeking to uphold the mystery while allowing history to bring the tangible earth of this site into detail. What stuck out for me is the ways in which each successive layer of a still active site for Druids today, keeps reaching backwards, as though seeking after an eternal Truth to explain its existence. This would become more clear as my shuttle drops me off at the entrance and I make my way through that first clear obstacle which is the visitor center. (by all means, take advantage of the museum and purchase that souvenir- I admit, I bought a shirt- but for me it was a stark reminder of the ways tourism can mark these sacred sites in particular ways). 

I was given the advice before I left to make sure and walk the path up to the stones rather than taking the bus. The way the stones gradually come into view, the way you can wander through the fields amongst the sheep, the way it gives you a sense of the larger landscape to which these stones belong, is all part of the integrity of that experience. It’s a way of allowing the stones, which are now fenced off, to regain their presence in what becomes an ever present and ever more aware sacred story.

Once you reach the stones, the site itself is designed as a labyrinth, with the circle gradually bringing you closer and closer to the monument as you go around (gimmicky photo-ops included if you want). Here its about seeing the meaning of each new angle, with each stone holding its own significance. The final stage of the labyrinth brings you pretty close to the stones, you just can’t touch them or wander the inner circle (although there are select tours that do take you into the inner circle prior to the visitor centers opening hours, nearby Amesbury does have similar neolithic stones which you can wander through and touch for free). Still, being this close to the Stonehenge circle was, for me, a surreal, likely once in a lifetime, experience.

“Belief is the sense organ of faith, as your eyes are the sense organ of sight.” (Stephen Lawhead)

For Lawhead, one of central themes that runs through his stories, each inspired by the different corners of this vast, ancient andscape and its perserving of an old, eternal Story, is this conception of the human journey as one that seeks to find the necessary intersection between spiritual truth and earthly kings. He is especially attuned to the conversation that exists between Christianity and the enduring symbols of a celitic age that draw us into history’s witness to this deep undercurrent of belief. This is something that captured my young mind, as someone who has always wrestled with the nature of the metaphysical. This invitation to embark on the necessary adventure with the characters of his books, themselves being pulled from long held traditions, in a way that seeks a broadening of our world, not a narrowing of it. That seeks to understand how this tangible witness fits with the narratives we use and employ to explain it. Lawhead, occupying the same space and the same streets that Lewis and Tolkien once travelled touches on this fervent need to find a narrative that can make sense of all the world’s stories. In my later years, this would form the necessary crisis point that found me at my own intersection concerning this very quesiton. In many ways, this pilgrimage is acting as the culmination of a decades long attempt to flesh this out, following words that were handed to me in the form of a quest: the invitation to remember a world long buried by the narrowing practices of my adult self.

As it is with all of these encounters, every space seems to capture the very same tension when it comes to our need to interpret them. The very thing that inspired these literary voices across the isles to wonder about the facts of the figurative “adult world” we have been handed, motivates the need to tell the stories of these places again and again which seek to reenchant it. As Burl suggests in his book, “today, all that is left is the wreckage.” The ruins, for as difficult as that might be to imagine standing next to it. Ruins that must then be interpreted.

Ruins that beg the necessary questions that continue to hold the mystery intact: why did they build it?

There is no way through this question that doesn’t bring us to the simple observation of the site’s “sacred” presence. Whatever the answer to that is, the reason we are standing there looking at these stones today is because they bear witness to that essential story. That’s the great irony of historians whom seek to reduce this site to “mere stones,” which they can then methodically explain away. Such an explanation leaves us with a portrait of a thing that had no real reason to be preserveed. It likewise hands us a narrative in which the modern world, with all of it’s accomplishments and creations will have no reason to be sought or remembered. A world devoid of history where all such questions begin to fade, and with it any sense that what we are seeking through the witness of history is the mystery itself.

We can spend all of our time seeking to explain the how, but, as Burl demonstrates, the question that remains on the otherside of all this unearthing is why. Thats where our true quest begins. To unearth that question is to find that intersection between the transcendent spirit and the earthly kings. This is, in fact, what brought these stones back into view after endless years of neglect, was the rediscovery of the sites sacred importance.

“It has ever been thus. The way is hard and narrow, it is true. But it is a path beaten smooth by the countless others who have gone before us. And good news! We do not have to walk it alone. God Himself is with us and has blessed us with friends for the journey.” (The Fatal Tree, Bright Empire Series)

“God has always worked through the small, the insignificant, the powerless- it seems to be sewn into the very fabric of the universe.” (The Spirit Well, The Bright Empire Series)

It’s a wonder for me to consider that the ground I am standing on was travelled by those who moved these stones. By those who’s continued rites brought these stones to life, revealing a world shaped by unseen exisetences. By those who continued to preserve its power to reveal the Story against great odds. This is, in many respects, what we might call one of those liminal spaces, where God indwells creation in all of it’s sordid and often bloodied witness. And where this indwelling can be found, we find the necessary communion with one another.

I do not embark on this pilgrimage alone. I remember the words of Agatha Christie, which I talked about in my previous blog, as she embarks on that train in an effort to go it alone, following the world shattering nature of the affair and eventual divorce from her husband. I talked about how this act, in the light of her larger story (and the Story that drew her to grow in her understanding of the world), actually worked to reveal the simple truth that none of us move through this world alone, regardless of a tendency to convince ourselves that we do.

And the most powerful thing, in my mind, about the fact of this communion, the same communion all of these literary voices shared with one another, is the ways in which these sacred spaces, for as insignificant as I feel standing next to these massive stones, are precisely where we are called to see that the mystery finds its indwelling, its truest expression, in the continued partcipation of these seemingly insignficant lives in these acts of communion with one another. The cosmic Story these stones are telling ultimately call us back into the world of the everyday. This is where we find the collision between the Empire and the sacred gaining its revelance.

This is, in fact, the story of the ancient Druids that stood at this site all those yearas ago. Where the sheer force of the Empire deems them the enemy, the sacred work continues to happen through the small and the insignficant acts of communion. This, for me, feels like good news.

David Suchet, whom helped bring Agatha Christie’s iconic detective, Hercule Poirot, to life on the small screen from 1989 to 2013, wrote a recently released book called Travels With Agatha Christie, in which he, along with his wife Sheila, retrace the steps of her early promotional tour for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 (which became known as the Empire Mission Tour).  As Suchet suggests, “Agatha used her own life in her novels, and it leaps off the page,” and this particular moment in Agatha’s life becomes a window into the world she once occupied and a way into understanding some of the key events shaping her life within that world at the time.

All along the way, with his own journey finding the same world a century later, Suchet provides a contrast between these two vantage points, both as a means of bringing a full bodied view of Christie to the surface with all of it’s wanted complexities, but also as a grander witness to the ways in which story endures and is perserved through the passage of time.

For perspective, “By the time Agatha was on this expedition, the British Empire covered around 35.5 million square Kilometers across the world, roughly a quarter of the earth’s total land area.” This was “just following the First World War,” Agatha being 31, married, and the mother of two,” having just published her second book (The Secret Adversary). 

What’s at once admirable and revealing about Suchet’s approach here is, he never uses the contrast of these “worlds apart” perspectives, this visible gap that exists between the world he is now encountering through hearing the stories of those whom “the Empire had tried to exclude” and the world Chrstie would have known back in 1922, to diminish the validity of her story. Rather, he uses it to capture a more nuanced conversation about the ways in which we discover the important figures of our childhood and our culture.

By getting to know Christie, and indeed Christie’s text, “in her world,” we can begin to appreciate who she was and why she told these stories. It becomes a unique point of analysis to locate her stories in the midst of a modern world now beginning to be thrown into question in the aftermath of the war. War permeates so much of Christie’s stories. As she is embarking on this Empire Mission Tour, signs are all around her depicting an already crumbling Empire. One of the more fascinating aspects of her life and her stories is that this is the reality in which her notoriety really begins to take off all around the world (as Suchet says, her books are second in sales only to the Bible). In many ways, her stories stand in the gap between the shifting tides of two world Empires, Britain on one side, America on the other, bearing witness to a global literary legacy that retains its roots in England defined through a sort of prophettic restlessnes with modernism itself. In a very personal way, this disilluisonment with the world emerges in her later stories as well, following a devastating affair and divorce, the thing that sparks what then becomes an enduring love for train travel (deciding to head out on the Orient Express, a life long dream, in order to seek a fresh start of outside of the public eye)

Agatha is defined as a woman with a hidden exuberance and quirky personality, passionate and pious, someone whom carved a deep love for the sea, for travel for the natural world, and for people. Who’s personal story quietly transformed the world of her encounters as a strong, independent woman and spirit, translating her own feminist concerns into a simple act of doing and being who she is in the face of so much uncertainty (read up on her surfing exploits, you won’t regret it). In his most apt descriptive, Suchet describes her as being “very sensitive to the world,” translating that to her deep felt need for drawing out real and honest characters through her stories.

“One must do things by oneself sometimes. Either I cling to everything that’s safe and that I know, or else I develop more initiative, do things on my own.” (Agatha Christie)

I talked about some of the ways my choice to switch from the car to the train ultimately ended up sacrificing and/or throwing into chaos certain parts of my trip in my previous blog in this space. One of the very real things I gained, an experience I wouldn’t otherwise have had, was the chance to enter into Christie’s story via the mode of transport she most loved. The simple joy of travelling this particular route along the coast up to Torquay, her place of birth and her continued home, is magical. A ride in which every turn brings a different seaside village or ocean vantage point into view.

Hearing her story, I spent some time thinking about my own solo trip, a product of our present life situation in which certain responsibilities have limited my wife and I from being able to travel together the way we have for most our married life. I feel the anxiety of that once powerful push against this idea of getting creative with our plans, with this concept of venturing out on my own bringing deep feelings of uncertainty. I feel the tension she describes, in making sense of how such points of initiative fit with the fact that none of us are ever truly doing anything “on our own.” This revelation from Christie is not so much a wanted grasp of a sought after individualism, but an invitation to keep the world that is shaping her in view, in times when life threatens to bury it. To hold fast to that simple need to be a participant in this thing we call life. For Christie, the bigger the world became, the more meaningful home becomes.

Torquay is her home, of which she describes it as “my home, off and on, nearly all my life.” It sits at the heart of what has been coined the English Riviera. This is a place where the waters carry a rich bluish tinge and the streets a golden hue, where the emergence of the sun, which I got to witness from my deck as the clouds finally cleared, giving way to its setting, reveals a once hidden space that before didn’t exist. Dig a little deeper and you find the long standing economic struggles that seperates the town from the enchantment of its High Street, This remains the modern shape of the town, and I found it equally interesting to read through the present state of its politics and the ambitious plans for revitalization that is reimagining and reshaping the immediate future of the area. But to gain a glimpse into Christie’s world, the immediate interest is in walking what is called the Agatha Christie mile.

I could recount my own experiences here of walking in her footsteps, but this was my guide, and it does a wonderful job of bringing these spaces alive. For me, I booked a seaside room at the Imperial Hotel overlooking Beacon Cove, the place where she once thrilled over the simple act of bathing in the sea. For my part, arriving at that train station and stepping off on to the same platform, walking down the same streets, imagining the area that once was her home, seeing the plant collection that inspired her more fun, maccabre sensibilities, strolling the same shorelines that continue to define her conception of “home,” it led me to think more deeply about what it means to love the homes that we have inherited. This is the thing Agatha Christie modeled, this practice of expanding our view of the world, an act that this pilgrimage was opening up for me in this very moment, while simitaneously allowing that to shape our participation in the homes we have inherited. And what lies behind that is the similar revelation which shapes all of the literary voices of my childhood: the powerful role that story plays in binding these two things together.

Christie never got to see the world that Suchet is encountering in his travels today. In some ways it’s quite a different space. In many ways it’s very much the same. It’s the fact that Christie lived her life in the world that was right in front of her that felt so poignant to me. It’s a reminder that, for all the ways in which the modern world sells its myth of progress, this problematic way of measuring our present based on scapegoating the past and the valourization of an illusioned future only serves to bury the world that is right in front of us, disconnecting us from the real invitation. This is what Suchet intuitively picks up on in “minding the gap” between Christie’s travels and his own, something that Christie’s own journey observes through the acts of writing and creating it inspired: this modern myth can only ever condemn the world we are called to inhabit. To inhabit the world that is right in front us, as Christie so modeled, is to learn how to love it.

The evening sun is setting as I drag my now weathered luggage up the cobblestone streets of York back to York Station. I am heading, briefly, back to London, this time taking a different route on a train that is both running and on time. Here the landscape, still visible in the slow descent of the night shadows, winds its way backwards, from the open fields of the Yorkshire hills to the populated centers of the London suburbs. My destination: the sleeper train to Penzance, where I will be exploring the grounds of Arthurian lore and walking in the footsteps of Agatha Christie.

It’s worth pausing here for a second to fill in an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to weaving together the story of my travels up to this point. Before things went awry with my train to York (see my previous post), and in fact precisely on route from Moreton on Marsh to Birmingham where I was catching my connecting train to York, I made a decision to pivot from my previously laid plans. I had a rented (or sorry, hired) a car for my time in Cornwall, a decision that had been met with a heavy word of caution by many of the different voices in my online UK/England travel groups. The words “don’t do it” were probably the single most common word of advice I got in the months leading up to this trip. The combination of likely getting saddled with a stick shift despite asking for an automatic, having to learn the rules of the roads and its endless roundabouts, of those forecasted hour long drives turning into a 3 hour white knuckle “drive 30 below the speed limit” reality, of the scenery getting hidden by the endless hedgerows; all of this added up to a singular conclusions: hiring a car made it the wrong way to go.

Despite the fact that I drive a school bus for a living and was proficient at driving manual, those opinions had left me with these persistant nagging feelings of uncertainty ever since I booked the vehicle. Now, in this moment, with my feet on the ground, and having seen the roads up close and personal, it wasn’t so much that I feared the drive (that part I felt was slightly overblown), rather it was the fact that I now spent most of my trip getting comfortable with and learning the rules of the train system, I started to think I could easily navigate the coming days by cancelling my car and switching to train travel instead, although it did require a few intentional sacrifices:

The cons:

• getting from Penzance to Tintagel, the location of that Arthurian history, meant planning around the extra time needed to accomodate an hour train ride and the additional hour and 15 long bus ride to get there,
• the freedom to traverse the trails of Coleridge and a planned visit to where site where Watership Down was written (a stop along the way from Stonehenge to Oxford) had to be taken off the list

The pros:

• saves money
• removes the anxiety

The biggest hit felt to be missing out on Watership Down, one of those locations that felt particularly important to my journey when it came to the literary side of England, but I did welcome the notion of simplifying the trip and easing some of those nagging anxieties.

But of course, as things go, just as soon as I make this decision I find myself facing my first real challenge when it comes to the realibility of train travel (once again, see my previous post on Yorkshire). I now find myself replacing one nagging anxiety with another.

For now, one of my biggest worries- making it to my costly sleeper train- could be set aside. The familiar sites of London were coming back into view, and I was an easy tube ride away from Kings Cross to Paddington station, where I would find my accomodations for the night. I had taken a sleeper train three times before, twice in Italy, once in Ukraine, where we crossed the border into Poland. This would be the first time I experienced a sleeper train without interruptions. In Italy we opted for the cheaper seats rather than the bunks, which was basically one endless revolving door, and in Poland, while we had beds, the border crossing ensured that actual sleep would be hard to come by. 

This was probably one of the best sleeps I had during my trip. There’s something about the gentle movement of the train and the absence of interruptions that equalled a kind of serenity, crackin the curtain open from time to time to let the passing countryside lull me back into my dreams. And the simple joy of falling asleep in one place, and waking up in another. That can’t be beat.

I arrived in Penzance at 7:00 a.m. The sun is shining, I can hear the gentle sounds of the Atlantic pushing in against the seawall across the concrete parking lot currently obscuring it from my view. Having uprooted my initial plans to make my way to the rental place, I had left this morning open to last minute decisions. The first order of business was getting a picture of St. Micheals Mount at low tide, which I had timed out perfectly. This is when the water clears, revealing the golden granite pathway to the island hidden underneath. It’s a magical sight, and if i had the time to actually visit the island I absolutely would have, with its historic castle and church, visible from the shore, beckoning with its promise of a perfect detour.

The second order of business was deciding whether to stay in Penazance or head over to St. Ives, where I could find some breakfast, before ultimately making the long trek over to Tintagel castle. This, however, is where things started to go wrong.

Beginning with a delayed train going to Bodman Parkway, which is where you transfer to the bus heading to Tintagel.

This mattered to my plans, because this single bus operates on 2 hour intervals (or a bit over, in fact). Meaning, when you miss one you have to wait over 2 hours for the next one. Suddenly the lack of a car was having a direct impact, as the fact of missing that early bus connection meant a choice between a very quick turn around at Tintagal or a very late arrival at Torquay, which is where I was spending the night.

I had three choices in this moment.

Option 1: Cancel my plans to Tintagel, and reroute myself either to some extended time in St. Ives and/or the old medieval center of Exeter, which was on route to Torquay.

Option 2: Go with the quick turn around at Tintagel

Option 3: Head straight to Bodmin Parkway and hire a cab from there

I did check my cancelled hired car to see if a rental was still available: it wasn’t.

The only thing I knew was that Penzance was clearly a port city, and while I am sure it’s a worthwhile place to explore with the right amount of time, here it felt more like a point of transit. Whatever my decision, I needed to get back to the train station and be on my way.

I decided to look into hiring a cab. I tried one of the local companies. They informed me they had no availability. I then happened upon a third party site that suggested it had found me a cab at a cost. That cost being 70 pounds one way. In a rash decision I decide to make the booking for a return trip as well, eating the cost purely so that I could gain what I deemed to be likely a once in a lifetime investment exploring Tintagel castle. After all, that was my primary reason for making this trek to Cornwall.

I make the booking online, which involved paying with my credit card, only to find out that they take the payment first and then work on finding you a hired car. So now I was stuck with this pending transaction and no guaranteed cab.

If you’ve ever been in this kind of situation in a place that’s still relatively foreign to you, it’s not a great feeling. Months of planning suddenly all crashing down in a single moment. What i thought would be simple was anything but, and it felt like the clock was ticking on both a wasted day and burning a potentially hefty price tag.

In any case, knowing that I needed to do something, I got back on the next train heading to Bodmin Parkway, knowing that I would either be stuck there in a middle of nowhere station wasting 2 hours, or I would hear back from this booking along the way. What really becomes aware in this moment is that I am travelling back in the same direction I had just come from. I might be wrong, but I don’t think the sleeper train has a choice of getting off at additional stops. It doesn’t have the same sliding doors as the other cabs, and it requires the attendant unlocking and opening the doors for you to get off. Nevertheless, I started to think about how getting off at St. Ives or Bodman Parkway on the way down would have been a much better plan. given my pivot away from a car rental.

As it was, there was nothing I could do about it in the moment, and it was at the precise moment I passed through St. Erth, where St. Ives comes into view, that I took a breath.

While it would have been a nice place to grab breakfast, I would get my seaside town experience in Torquay, and simply seeing it from the train satisfied my wanted curioustiy about this colourful, touristy, beach retreat (which is not really my thing anyways). If engaging a planned pilgrimage was going to teach me anything, it would be learning how to take the experiences that are right in front of me for what they are and what they have to say. That breath felt like a good time to begin some breathe prayers. We sould see how the rest of the day shakes up, but for this moment: exhale.

I am reminded now that I am treading the grounds of Arthurian lore, an awe inspiring thought for someone who has long been captivated by these old stories. And if my accompanying audiobook, Malcolm Guite’s Galahad and the Grail, and my great courses choice of King Arthur: History and Legend by scholar Dorsey Armstrong, were any indication, all such quests are bound to face adversity. Equally so, all such quests are bound to encounter their maidens, which, according to Armstrong, was not about the romance but rather about marking the start of a necessary adventure, one which can authenticate ones kinghthood. The maidens in this sense can occupy any number of different roles. In fact, this is why these stories feature knights making seemingly endlessly dumb decisions that leave them embarking on puzzling ventures and often completely unnecessary journeies with little more reason than “just because” (as Armstrong puts it). It would seem I’ve got this covered with my decision to leave such plans to the last moment and falling prey to a $270 Canadian credit card charge (that’s what went my statement officially said) in my efforts to make it to the grounds of King Arthur’s castle. Just knight me now.

Deep breathes. As I continue to watch the landscape transform in front of me, I simitaneously begin to appreciate having that extra hour of sleep that brought me to Penzance, regardless of now retracing my steps, and the opportunity to experience this full journey in the daylight.

I arrive at Bodmin Parkway. Still no word back from my hired car. Just the looming charge still staring me in the face from a third party site that may or may not be legit. As I walk off the train with nowhere to go but sit and wait, I see a cab waiting at the station. It’s not tracking me down, but as I approach I recognize the name on the side. It’s the initial local cab company I contacted, whom had informed me there was no availability. Recognizing the name, I decide to stop and ask, just to ensure they weren’t there for me. No, he says, but upon briefing him on my present situation he says he remembers me. He was the one I had been dialguing with earlier. He asks if he could see my third party site. He shakes his head. “I’ve been driving for many years,” he tells me. “I’ve never in my life heard of this site.”

My heart begins to sink again with the recognition that this is looking to be one of those inevitable regrets I would be taking with me to my grave.

More deep breathes. These breathing exercises are beginning to wear thin by now.

The driver of the hired car can see my sense of defeat. That’s when he tells me to hold on for a second as he picks up his phone. A minute later he tells me he’s tracked down a local driver of a small business in town. A reputable and trustworthy small business who is able to be here in five minutes. It might be the case that I end up eating the costs of this failed third party venture, but he would get me to Tintagel for a flat price of 50 pounds.

Here was my figurative maiden helping the plot progress to the next chapter. The driver indeed shows up 4 minutes later, and I’m standing at the foot of Tintagel Castle in 30, now with a good four hours to explore the grounds and the town before catching the (3 pounds) bus back to Bodmin.

About halfway to Tintagel I also (finally) get a message, after my repeated attempts to contact them using the only modes provided- the online message service and email, that my now expired booking was being refunded because “they couldn’t fill the request.”

Deep breathes again, as I consider the very same roads I would have been travelling in my rental car.

Yep, lots of hedgerows.

Later, on the bus route back to Bodmin, which extends a half hour ride to a full hour and 20 via a meandering route through the areas different towns, the landscape would be much more visible and tranquil. What started in chaos ultimately resulted in a quick transfer from the train to a hired car, and later on a perfectly timed bus and train ride to Torquay where I will end my evening. For now though, a meeting with Merlin awaits.

A highlight of my trip by far: reaching the top of those towering cliffs overlooking the Atlantic, the shores of Ireland sitting hidden off in the distance, the statue of Merlin standing with it’s back turned, looking out towards the castle ruins and the coastal town, sword in hand. It is an arresting and truly majestic scene, one that, with the aid of the Great Courses book in hand, resonates with its deep rooted history. Here I am invited to imagine the once imposing castle walls, now visible in remnants, standing atop these cliffs, built here as they once were because of it’s connection to the Arthurian legends. As a growing body of evidence seems to be supporting amidst a still hotly debated mash-up of working theories, it’s here in these grounds that the historical figures gave rise to the legend that we know today, working its way Eastward and, eventually, back westward, being woven into the fabric of the lands ancient formation and the cultures that drive it as it goes.

What we know for a fact is, somewhere in the 4^th and 5^th centuries, which Armstrong defines as the true (and only) dark ages in the history of Britain, a moment in time where history seems to legitimately stop and disappear from sight, some unexpected force led seemingly by a singular dramatic figure did the impossible, both leading an unimaginable resistance against the much more powerful forces invading from the North and now sweeping it’s way across Britain. And leading them not to be destroyed but rather to retreat and flee. It would be soon after this that the name Arthur begins to make its way through royal lineages for unknown reasons, giving good credence to the preservation of what becomes an oral heritage of a true historical account. An oral heritage that gets preserved in these centuries now through the layers that are built over top, hence handing us the significance of Tintagel, a place marked by the convictions of those whom existed in prxominity to these centuries that this space and this figure were hugely important to their existence and their perseverance.

The legends of Arthur that we know today are a product of centuries of constant movement, from Britain (or as some might argue, from Scotland) to Wales, from the Netherlands to Germany, and on to Scandinavia and Italy before ultimately swinging back again into England primed and ready to be re-appropriated as a freshly anointed origins story and myth for the emerging Empire. Thus it becomes, as these things so often do, a fusion of the many cultures and stories it encounters on its journey through these different lands, each giving it a unique spin and addition as it converses with, a phrase I’ve often repeated along this journey, all the world’s stories. One can’t help but find in the story of this development a sense of this shared experience across these lands, a story powerful enough to connect these different cultures to a larger, sacred Truth enfolding the whole, and indeed the story, at its beating heart, has always served this very purpose.

As such stories do, the reigning image here, as one stands at the edge of these looming cliffs, is one of towers and ruins. In this contrast we find the shape of this movement through history, where the transient reality of Empire clashes with the enduring reality of these sacred spaces, in this case reaching back into the lands ancient celtic roots. As I learned in Bath, it’s always the eradication of the sacred spaces that the Empire’s constructed temples save for last. Standing here in this space, letting Guite’s masterful work of poetry wash over me in its eclectic prose, I am drawn to seek that sacred source, the Truth that stands above this movement, beckoning us to look for those liminal spaces that remain. I feel like this is one of those spaces.

This is the power of Story. It roots us in this sense of Truth. It finds a way to make sense of all the world’s stories. It leads us to look over that great expanse of ocean, and then to turn with the sheer force of that great Wizard towards the story of the lands now spilling out before us. An invitation to then participate in the Story to which this belongs, to wield the magic of that great mystery that is the chaos of the deep waters into a force that can then transform these now divided lands.

Towers and ruins.

It’s in the ruins of these lands that we are invited to dig deeper and reach further to recover the power of those old stories to remind us of the adventure we have been invited to embark on, adventures we might call a life, a life that then binds us to the stories that echo the mystery flowing outwards from that dramatic shoreline. Where all such stories seek to find that Story which can  reveal the necessary sacred truths that lie at the heart of the magic that once enchanted these lands.

This, it would seem, has always been an inherent part of the human experience. The need for Story. The need to tell our stories as we embark on such foolish and seemingly futile adventures as imagining a transformed world. It’s here where we authenticate our true identity as children of our maker rather than being relegated to slaves of the Empire. It’s here where our quest seeks the grail, that mysterious sacred presence that evades, in the lore, all but one. A mystical force that, as Armstrong helps explore, seems to have its roots in every culture, with every effort to locate its origins beyond its emergence in the Arthurian legend in the eleventh century, leading us to dig deeper and reach further.

To work ones way back down from the summit, to follow in the direction of Merlin’s unbroken gaze, is to chose to step into the journey, to embark on the quest. This is the way one must travel, across the awaiting rivers and hills and fields, however foolish the journey might appear. For me, this journey will be bringing me to the English Riveria, to walk the footsteps of one of the great mystery writers in England’s history, and perhaps all of history. 

  

And look! In through the window of the train carriage, next to his rattling first-class teacup, can be spied a notebook, which is aspiringly, if provisionally, titled: The Complete Guide to Britain’s Only Named Wind.

Marverlous! It’s about time someone wrote a book for Helm

…  I intend to capture its very spirit and I shall record it in detail for the Quarterly.

Capture it’s spirit! Did you hear that, Fitz? Bodge is intending to have a windy seance….

Charles, never underestimate the value of the amateur’s diary. Never dismiss oral evidence. Where would we be without it?

Sarah Hall’s newest novel, Helm, was another one of the books that accompanied me on my pilgrimage to rediscover my childhood stories as one who is now approaching his 50th year of living. Set in Northern England, on the entry point to the Yorkshire Moors, it’s premise recounts the story of Britain’s only named wind- Helm. The book opens with a quote from Edward Thomas (The Mountain Chapel),

When gods were young. This wind was old

Mass begins this, then, by delving into a cosmic origins story,

“In the beginning there was no Helm. Boring for the world, obviously. There were aeons before Helm arrived. The necessary arrangements had to be made, on the planet and in the sky. It would take Ages for Helm to be recognized, let alone named… But in the beginning nothing else had a name either.”

Before going on to tell of Helm’s wide angle view of history’s emergence and inevitable movement through time itself, here the story of Helm is drawing us into what we might call the eternal mystery, while similtaneously reminding us of the ways in which this mystery places us in direct relationship to this world that we know.

One of the more powerful moments of my trip comes from my tour through the Yorkshire Moors. Moving through the Howardian Hills, a landscape that emerges dotted with a mix of lavender fields, unsuspecting (and relatively new) vineyards, castles and Abbey ruins, we eventually make our way around to the market town of Helmsley, nestled in a valley at the entry point to the North York Moors National Park.

Part of this tour was supposed to include travelling on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway (hello Harry Potter), which is located here, and of which we did a drive by, but this was the one day of the week when it doesn’t run.

As stated in our email, in exchange we are given both transportation and admission to the famous Abbey in Whitby. A fair exchange in my mind, as that was my main destination on a tour that otherwise would have dropped me off at the town center adjacent to the bottom of those 199 steps up.

What the email didn’t say was that this exchange also meant we could stop at High Blakey Ridge, an incline sitting at the center of the Moors before winding its way down through Danby and a series of smaller towns leading to the North Sea. This is where I encountered Helm.

It’s something our tour guide prepares us for, walking through the lore that gives it it’s agency. He reminds us again about the force we are about to encounter before we open our doors, one that is as sure as the ground we would be standing on. “Let it hit you,” he says. “Experience it.” And here we open the doors to what can only be described as an otherwordly experience, encountering a wind unlike anything I have experienced before. Hall’s narrative suddenly breaks open, coming alive in a whole new way as I wander the hillside looking out over the valley, sheep gently grazing the one side, the expansive views opening up on the other. There’s something here that witnesses to the unbroken relationship between the intangibles of the sacred and the groundedness of the earth. Something that calls out and needs to be named.

This experience, rooted now in memory,  is what I carry with me to the North Shore, a town soaked in it’s own lore, the grand ruins of Whitby Abbey standing as its own witness atop those looming cliffs, looking out into the seas expanse as it keeps watch over the town. As writer Shayle Follows writes in a 20206 article for the Whitby Guide,

One of my favourite things about Whitby Abbey is that you do not even have to be standing beside it to feel it’s presence. It is always there, sitting high above the town, sneaking into the background of your photos and making every view feel a little more dramatic. Whether you are walking along the harbour, looking back from the beach, or exploring the cobbled streets below, the Abbey has a way of stealing the scene.

As Follows goes on to say, it’s easy to see why Bram Stoker was taken with this place. It’s why we endeavor to walk those steps at all, the very setting for what becomes his iconic novel. Here, standing at the top, with Robin Hood’s Bay looming in the distance on one side, Newcastle Upon Tyme on the other, is my introduction to the town sitting below, every turn of those 199 steps giving you a new and fresh vantage point to it’s rows of coloured houses and market shops lining the River Esk as it spills out into the North Sea waters.

Once you decend those steps and venture out into the streets, making your way to the Whitby Bridge, the central connection between the two sides of the river, you are greeted not just by that expansive view of the world, but a living, breathing culture. Crossing that river is where you enter into the story of Whitby, from it’s Viking heritage (as I learned, this is written into the town’s named streets: nothing like names such as Haggersgate to immerse you in its character), to it’s role in the story of Captain Cook, which you will find embedded in nearly every corner of it’s architectural design. It was here that Cook learned the ways of the sea and where the boats were built, eventually launching him into the pages of the history books.

A fun suprise here. Whitby is also home to Caedmon, cited as the English language’s oldest known poet. You can learn about him at the Abbey, but his presence stands witness to a fascinating and enduring story that reveals his own witness to this relationship between the natural world (anchored in his love for it’s creatures) and the enduring, sacred presence of the Divine, his poetry wrestling with the tensions inherent within that relationship from the vantage point of God’s love and God’s judgment. A cross memorial stands up by the Abbey documenting his importance, itself looking out over a town that remains a calling card to spiritual seekers. a town visibly marked by the gothic obsessions it happily claims as its birthright. Here Stoker’s words ring out into this intersection of these two working tensions, the expansive mystery being held in the chaos of the waters and the quiet dance of the humans seeking to name it where land and water meet.

The words of Stoker come to mind here:

There are mysteries that Man can only guess at which age by age may only solve in part

Recounted in an article for Time magazine by Dacre Stoker and JD Barker, Bram Stoker, in the summer of 1890, stopped at the library in Whitby and requested a specific title (The Accounts of Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia by William Wilkinson), to which he opened “to a specific section” and jotted in his journal. What follows is a map, outlining a journey that begins in London and ends on the shores of Romania, and the accounting of a shipwreck called the Dmitri, out of which the mysteries surrounding the history of this shipwreck, originating as it did from Eastern Europe, blends into the pre-existing Yorkshire myths regarding Barghest, a large black dog, which in this account was stated to be observed by the crew to have escaped the ship and run up the 199 steps and into the graveyard of St. Mary’s Church. The article describes the famed Irishman now finding a smile forming across his face as he sees what the article calls “a blurry place between fact and fiction.” A liminal space where the world just might be able to break open and unsettle our senses, and, dare one say, begin to make some sense. In a startling phrasing, the article states,

“Bram Stoker did not intend for Dracula to serve as fiction, but as a warning of a very real evil, a childhood nightare all too real.”

But the first 100 pages of the novel, which set the stage for Stoker’s alleged intent, were purged from it’s original form, out of fears coming from publishers back in London over the great evil of a murderer still on the loose, and what such a story might do to those seeking to control it. What remains still buried in history, perserved only through the bits and pieces of journal entries and writings from which we gain glimpses of it, witnesses to Stoker’s own uncomfortable relationship with what was being purged, namely his convictions about the true nature of this world we occupy and the nature of this thing we call evil.

Here I found myself thinking back through my pilgrimage, a pilgrimage that pushes through similar stories held in the pages of England’s vast literary voices. Voices standing in the midst of modernism’s persistant grip on the world of the ever emerging West, and wrestling with visions of a world now being buried underneath. Here sacred truths are being purged and redefined, traded for the rhetoric of what is being branded the age of reason, a rhetoric these voices found to be deeply ironic.

Stoker believed, as did the authors that share this same breadth of conviction, that truth, and its bedfellow reason, is found in the enduring power of story. This is what preserves truth and persists against our tendency to reject rationality in favour of that which we can control. To the modern world, any story that confronted the deep rooted fears of such an enterprise becomes reclaimed and reappropriated as lore, a fun remnant of an old world now purged of it’s original meaning and relegated to the field of the classics. A field now controlled by the newly claimed powers of it’s constructed academia. And yet, to dig into the history of these stories, to let this history speak, is to recover a very different story, one that witnesses to a very different understanding about what is true about this world that we both observe and experience, the very world the metaphors of these old stories seek to reveal.

Read through any of the plethora of articles wading through the complicated waters of our attempts to retreive Dracula’s origins story, and you’ll find this basic line being drawn in the sand: those who downplay Stoker’s convictions about the world he was trying to capture and reveal, and those who seek to bring that world to the forefront. The former, almost without exception, will inevitably lean into the vampire motif, believing that to dispel this in terms of the modern myth is to keep a story’s witness to the sacred and spiritual dimensions of this world at bay. And often, likely motivated in response, the latter doubles down on the legitimacy of a world of vampires, using the same modernist questions and approaches to prove such a world exists.

Both I think would miss the real point and fall into the same trap. The real question is, what is the shape of the world that this story is seeking to reveal. To what do the metaphors and symbols and images and creatures point. What gives these metaphors their power. What does this clash of myths reveal about the nature of all the world’s stories.

This is about whether or not this world has a spiritual dimension to which we ascend, or whether this world is defined according to the wanted materialism that hands the modernist  narrative its power over the world, to which we can then reduce the world to that which we can control.

It is known that Stoker drew inspiration from Emily Gerard’s article The Land Beyond the Forest, I find this a fascinating window into the mind of an author who was drawn to write about a world which we must ascend towards, a world which story could in fact reveal to its hearers, especially in the face of evil. It is the view of the materialist that dissects this story in terms of a modernist imposition, finding a split between nature and spirit and believing that the ultimate deconstruction of the spirit comes from proving that vampires are not real. But this is not how story works. This is not how the world Bram Stoker was accupying would have thought about these images, these metaphors. This story emerges precisely because of his conviction in a truth that transcends, a conviction that hands us a world which we cannot control. This, in my opinion, is the real source of that fear that sought to purge the book of the very history (the observation and experiences of the world Stoker was attempting to put into words and symbol) that tells us what he believed to be true. To be confronted by a world we cannot control is to have our wanted need to remake the world in our image undermined. It is to raise questions about the very modern enterprise that hands us this control. It hands us a world where our moral constructs do not have the power to define it, judge it, or control it, let alone make sense of it.

As I find in Sarah Hall’s story, theirs is a world where an encounter with the wind compels us to name it. This, I wonder, is what all of these stories are doing. This, I wonder, is what this pilgrimage is revealing. If the modern world that left these writers restless sought to remake the world in our own image, they found the power of story in the act of naming the world. This was their counter to what they perceived to be modernisms failure to make sense of the world, precisely because in naming it we are then handed a world that stands apart from us. That stands above us. Like the Abbey overlooking the town of Whitby, a story that then calls us to ascend those steps in order to encounter this reality as it is, something that then has the power to transform us, precisely because we cannot control it. A much more arduous and risky endeavor than reducing it to the whims of our wanted fancies and demands.

I would find this sentiment repeated as I return to those ancient walls and cathedrals of York, the clash between that modernist sensibility and the power of story highlighting the city’s own obsession with the latent spirituality inherent in Harry Potter.

Here, one of modernisms great apologists has penned a story that sparked a wanted need in it’s hearers: a need to re-enchant the world at long last. Perhaps against her own wanted intentions, the story has taken on a power all its own.

I think too about my later encounter in Oxford with a space shared by both Lewis and Pullman, two authors appealing to story for very different reasons, one seeking to reclaim a world buried by modernism through the telling of the old stories, the other seeking to bury the old world by reappropriating those old stories in service of the modern narrative. If ever there were a veritable expression of the present conflict, this would be it. What remains certain in my eyes though, is that the stories from which Pullman is drawing, the stories that permeated the world of England’s great literary voices, emerged precisely because of their shared conviction that the modernist narrative had failed to make sense of all the worlds stories, the very world they/we observe and experience. To encounter them on their terms is to allow them to speak, The question simply becomes, how does this speak to us.

For me, re-encounterimg the writers and stories of my childhood in this place, not only continues to validate the restlessness I held as a young kid, it reminds me of why that matters to the questions I am asking. It asks me to wonder in a reality that is both beyond me and that invites me to ascend those steps in my continued seeking of the truth it wants to reveal. And, dare I say, it continues to ask me to risk giving up my need to reduce it to terms that I can control. What it promises in exchange is actual transformation, but even more so an invitation to participate in that transformed view of the world and its inhabitants.

A day in the Cotswolds. That’s what my tour was called (shout out to the wonderful people at Go Cotswolds, a small grassroots company with a small passionate team who will quickly tell you before the tour starts: there’s no way to actually see the Cotswolds in a day). Another early morning wake up call, but for me this is what vacation is all about.

The day will eventually take an unexpected turn, but for the time being I remain blissfully ignorant of that (eventual) chaos. This moment is about my continued journey into these spaces that informed my childhood as a young reader. I talked about what the Cotswolds are in my previous blog on my visit to Stratford Upon Avon. This day was about travelling to a handful of it’s greatest hits: Stow on the Wold, Bourton on the Water, Broadway, Chipping Campden, Snowshill, Bibury, Moreton on Marsh.

When I mentioned my interests in the literary side of the country, the tour guide got a slight gleam in her eyes. I am told they like to tailor the tour as much as possible to the interests of the travellers in each unique group, and this, it would seem, was an easy mission. After all, if, in the history of this place, all roads lead out of London, the great literary minds of my childhood had a special fondness for the Cotswolds.

Of note:

• Stow on the Wold is where Lewis Carroll found his inspiration for the titular character in Alice in Wonderland
• Tolkien’s presence is felt all over the place, having spent much time traversing these grounds, including the famous Tolkien Door (also Stow on the Wold), the Broadway Tower (which I think my tour guide worked in just for me, influencing Tolkiens concept of Amon Hen), the Rollright Stones (which we never got to see), the Bell Inn in Moreton On Marsh (where I got to sit where Tolkien once sat, soaking in the inspiration for The Prancing Pony), and the countryside. For Tolkien, these influences reach all the way up into Birmingham (where I will end up at the end of the day), the place of his childhood, where sites like Sarehole Mill, Moseley Bog, Perrott’s Folly hand us the mill in Hobbiton, the Old Forest, the two towers, and is also the location of the church where Tolkien found himself being mentored by Father Francis Xavier following the death of his parents.
• J.M. Barrie’s history at Stanway House, where he had an amateur cricket team with Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne (can you imagine!!??)
• T.S. Eliot’s history in Chipping Campden, where visits with a close friend inspired what became his greatest poem (Burnt Norton), inspired by the manor of the same name
• Beatrice Potter, who’s famous book was inspired by Gloucester (for me this was a drive by)

My favourite of the places was Stow on the Wold. Hard to beat standing at that door.

Bourton on the Water is small and quaint, and the sort of place you would want timed for a sunrise or a sunset. It’s popularity definitely means crowds.

This is similar for the famous Arlington Row in Bibury, a place that makes you long for a picture without the crowds, which is ironically why the crowds are there in the first place.

In contrast, the grand streets of Chipping Campden, a bigger center (relatively speaking), are conditioned for those crowds, offering a welcome market town vibe with a decent area to explore off the beaten (High Street) paths.

I’m probably not alone here I’m sure, but second to walking or biking the Cotswolds Way, which I imagine this space is really designed for, is driving the countryside. I had a taste of this on the hour long bus ride from Moreton on Marsh to Stratford Upon Avon, which is quite beautiful, and this would be equally true for the train ride running through the opposite side of this storied terrain. This brings you through small towns such as Shipston on Stour, Limington, Honebourne, Blackminster, Upper and Lower Moor, and bigger places such as Gloucester and Evasham, framing your windows with a novelesque, page turning journey. On our tour, crossing over to Broadway and stopping in Snowshill (the picturesque town that provides the home and backdrop for Bridget Jones), Cotswold Lavender was one of the sites which would, for watchful eyes, break open as you emerged from the Hedgerows in their brilliant colour.

And then of course there’s your companions for the day, a small crew of people from around the world. One couple from Michigan making their first trip to England at 80 years old (and still rocking it) to meet their family (and heritage) after a lifetime of never having the opportunity. A middle aged mother on a mission to get pictures of those lavender fields for her daughter, and a couple bound and determined to find their ways into conversations with the locals at every stop (and consequentially became our running commentary on the old wool producing families still residing in the area). Although sadly the only time I had with her was the drive from Stratford Upon Avon to Moreton on Marsh, where she would transfer to the other tour (secret Cotswolds, which ironically was the trip I initially signed up for before time restricted my ability to get to Stow on the Wold), there was a wonderful woman from Australia whom would have made a great conversation partner along the way.

In talking to a friend, I spoke about my overall experience with the Cotswold’s, suggesting that I am absolutely glad I went, I enjoyed experiencing it, but I am not sure I feel a strong need to return. I would qualify that statement by saying, if I did return, I would endeavor to see it from the vantage point of travelling the Cotswolds Way.

Slow travel that has the luxory of soaking in multiple days of sunsrises and sunsets from different angles. Which is to say, I absolutely see the allure and the magic of the place for many, and this, I think, is it’s element. The reason, If I was to throw out a guess, for my slightly tempered response is the simple realization of what this space currently is, at least when it comes to its popularity as a tourist destination: a retreat for the rich. A place you wonder through and admire while knowing it remains essentially untouchable for most of us.

A place where you get bits and pieces of the generational life which still remains, much of that still connected to those old world practicies (hang on to those encounters when they come along the way), but mixed in with the big money, where you have to assume these figureheads have distanced themselves, through their walled off estates, from the same streets we are treading in interest of grabbing those sought after shots of the buildings and architecture they (thankfully) have been forced (by law through regulation) to preserve.

Saying all that, I know that there is a whole world to discover underneath the present layers. This is the same world that inspired those literary voices. This is a history that reaches back to early settlements, that contains important pieces of the UK’s history. And certainly, the further out you get from the popular centers, the more connected you start to feel with this still active heartbeat. A world untouched by the industrial revolution. There’s an irony here. When I made the change from the secret cotswolds tour to the day in the cotswolds, it was with the voice of one of the ones running the company ringing in the back of my head saying, I get the draw of the big hitters, but my favorite is the secret cotswolds. I feel like this might have been the right way to go for me personally, looking back, however, here I was driven by the need to see that famous Tolkien door. You could say I am the problem. In fairness, this was the theme of my personal pilgrimage, and it was, legitimately, a single decision that meant choosing between being able to see it or missing it altogether.

So there, I suppose, is my easy ticket back. If I was to return, the secret tour would make a great pairing with the Cotswolds Way. That to me feels true to seeing the place in its element.

Leaving all potential regrets behind, my day in the cotswolds nevertheless left me with some pictures and some memories, some great conversations and some more to imagine. The final moment of my day was heading to see The Bell Inn, as this is where we ended (and technically started) our tour, in Moreton on Marsh. A picture perfect finish to a relaxing day. Now it is onwards to Birmingham and then to York

Which is precisely the point in which things begin to go off the rails (pun intended).

Initially Birmingham was a stop over for the night, allowing me plenty of time to explore some planned Tolkien sites shown above (the Oratory of Saint Phillip where Tolkien was raised by the priest following the death of his parents, and home of St. John Henry Newman) the inspiration for the two towers in Perrots Folly and Edgbaston Waterworks Tower- pictures taken from google), which are very close togetherbut a window of oppportunity to visit Whitby, which was high on my list, reorganized this evening around a later train to York (the meeting point for my tour of the Yorhsire Dales and Whitby. So plans shifted to a quick cab ride out to see the church and the towers during my stop over.

As things go, timing is everything, and disrupted trains can easily upend any tightly scheduled plans. Thus I arrived in Birmingham with just enough time to check out it’s famous canal front. I would have to live with existing in proximity (a 30 mintue walk away to be precise) to these sites, although I reassure myself with the simple thought that Birmingham would be the necessary middle point for a planned return to the U.K prioritizing Wales and the Lake District. In any case, this would be, as it turns out, an omen for the rest of the night.

Arriving in Birmingham, I was immediately hit by what, I could only assume at the time in my ignorance, was a convention of some sort. I am talking the crazed fanatics kind, where I found myself navigating through crowds decked out in costumes and riding a next level demonstration of enthusiasm.

Or maybe this is just Birmingham, I thought in the moment. What do I know. In any case, that twinge of regret over not trying to call over that cab and making a mad dash for my Tolkien sites still sits with me, but given what was actually going on- England, I find out, was playing in the World Cup- I am not sure that would have been either possible nor the smartest move in the end. Not to mention I am sure that cab ride would have been at minum 120 canadian dollars. 

But then again, given the chaos that was about to ensue, I was minutes away, as it turned out, from getting some extended time in Birmingham. That’s how things go. At least I get a decent story from it all.

After my quick leisurely stroll (more an opportunity to stretch the legs), I returned to the train station to board my train to York. All seems good. I do indeed board the train, and (a very full) train does indeed depart the station.

Mere minutes into my departure (I am talking 10 minutes in), I get a muffled announcement come over the intercom. I can’t quite make out what it’s saying, but I catch hints of some sort of disruption. I chalk it up to connecting trains and dismiss it, as I am on a direct line to York. Settling in for the couple hour ride, the next thing I know a train agent is making his way up the aisle, stopping to chat with the different seats as he goes. I get my ticket ready, as I assume this is what he wants. By the time he arrives at my seat I’m getting the gist that there is more going on and that this just might impact me after all. Sure enough, I get the same shared pronouncment that this train, which is supposed to bring me to York, is being shut down. And not just this train, but an ever lengthening list of trains now also going dark, one after the other. Something about an electricity shortage or something like that. Our next stop would be the end of the line, and efforts to then redirect us using different connecting trains was falling apart in real time. This included the final trains of the night going to York being cancelled.

As I mentioned, had this happened in Birmingham, this would have given me that extra time I needed to get to my wanted sites, given that I would have changed to the later train prior to it being cancelled. Anyone with experience in how this works knows that the station is obligated to get you to where you are going, which means when all else fails they end up putting you in a hired cab. Best case scenario would have been getting an extended stay in Brimginham and eventually getting that cab from there. As it was, a train packed full of people now found themselves stuck at this middle of nowhere stop,. To make matters worse, the heat wave and the main event (the world cup) seemed to have emptied every vending machine of water, the one thing I failed to stock up on before I left (or more accurately couldn’t, as they were sold out in Birmingham High Street station as well).

For context, I am now somewhere in the vicinity of the Nottingham area, which is also bringing up one of my other regrets: not being able to get out to Sherwood Forest, and that feeling that I could be spending my time there instead of in this station. I have deep affection for the Robin Hood lore, but it was one of those places that required the good part of a day using the train, and doing my research, while it’s described as a quaint stop (the city of Nottingham), the forest itself was more about the lore than a needed destination in and of itself. A nice place to visit, as I heard many say, but not a priority.

But the lore nevertheless was a big part of my childhood, so here I am, once again looking from a distance knowing I am in proximity to it, biding my time with an increasingly restless crowd decked out in costume and short fuses. I can confirm, I got way too much information about way too many of their relationships over the fading hours of this unplanned stopover.

Eventually we got word to follow the station worker out to what was now a fleet of waiting taxis. When I say waiting, what it ultimatley demonstrated itself to be was another angsty mob, this time apparently made up of every possible available taxi fighting things out for the right to the desired contract. This was a windfall for them. I changed hands no less than four times just on route to “a” taxi. After one heated exchange between drivers, what should have been taxis with six people each started to be emptied out, sending half full taxis on their way. I can only assume this was an effort to give as many of them a piece of the contract as possible, and/or avoiding an all out war. What started as six in my cab filtered down to two. Me and a Russian lady who lives in York.

I should mention: it’s now approaching midnight. Some Russian Vodka feels like a needed thing right about now.

When we finally arrive at York Station it’s definitely past midnight. My reserved hostel isn’t far away, but navigating it in the dark was still a fun exercise. The first thing that greets you is the old city walls. Walking through these gates, which reminded me a bit of our time arriving in Krakow, you enter the old city center. At one point what I assume to be a cat or a dog comes running by me with a significant sized prized prey in it’s mouth. What a greeting from the otherwise empty streets.

The further up I go into the heart of the old city center, the closer I get to what is the ominous glow of light emanating from windows reaching up and down the street. TVs. Pub after pub, restaurant after restaurant, home after home, all still with their doors open and tables packed watching the still running game. Eventually I arrive at my hostel. I should mention, I have never stayed in a hostel before. I don’t really know how they work. In this case I made my way into the building where I had to push my way through the crowd of people to find what I eventually discovered was the check in point at the bar. They gave me directions to the room. I grabbed my key and made my way back out to the central halway to go get settled in. My first instruction: find the door that says basement on it. I’m looking. I can’t find anything. A guy notices me wandering around and asks me what I’m looking for. The basement, I say. He says oh, it’s over here. He opens a door for me and I head down the stairs. Suddenly the door shuts behind me and I find myself in the dark. The door I came through locks on the other side., so I can’t get out the way I came. I start feeling around through the faint glow of emergency lights dotting the roof. Damp, old stone walls. Some shelves. How am I going to get out of here?

This went on for about a good 7 minutes, when the lights suddenly come on, and the guy from the bar is standing there. A split second where I am slightly uncertain about how this is shaking down, but he apologizes. The guy who  let me down here, into what appears to be the supply room, didn’t know who I was or what he was doing. “You went too far,” he explains in his thick British accent . He then guides me up a back way I never would have found in the dark, out the door and towards my room.

At this point I am more than ready to head to bed. I have no idea what the actual etiquitte is for a hostel, but I am also not too concerned at this point. Plus, it seemed like everyone was still up at the bar watching the game. So I throw on my phone’s flashlight and find my bed number- great, it’s a top bunk. I don’t change, I just find the closest outlet, toss my bags up on the bed with me, shut the curtains, and curl up around it.

Ping.

Dang it. I neglected to turn my phone notifications to silent. I pull back the curtain, crawl back down the ladder, and silence my phone. Only to find myself considering another dilemma. If I leave my phone down here how do I hear my alarm? If I take it up with me, how do I charge it? I consider that my first instinct to leave it on the ground charging perhaps isn’t the best move, and opt out for charging my portable charger and keeping my phone with me. instead. As I finally look to get what appears to be about 5 and a half hours of sleep before needing to get up for the next day’s tour, for whatever resaon I find the words of the cotswolds way marker back at Chipping Campden playing through my head.

“Now the light falls across the open field, leaving the deep lane shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon.” (T.S. Eliot)

Sitting adjacent to The Salisbury plains is an area known as the Cotswolds, a word that combines the phrase sheep pen (cot) with hills (wold), reaching back to the Roman introduction of the Cotswold Lion (sheep) into these still rolling hills.

Here is a world preserved in time, having escaped the sweep of the industrial revolution that turned it’s eyes instead towards the most illustrious coal mining industry further East.

Today it has morphed into a veritable tourist industry, where robust laws continue to ensure that the wealthy (outside of long term residents, the only ones who could actually afford properities in this area today) must adhere to strict rules regarding what they are allowed to build/rebuild/renovate/destroy.

These are fairytale villages, which is the draw for many looking to escape into this other-world, easy to romanticize as a quintessential image of the English countryside, representing a different age disconnected from the trappings of the modern world. And walking the streets of these different villages, it’s easy to fall under it’s spell, with it’s unique golden coloured stone drawing in vibrant glows and casting out unaided reflections amongst the old world architecture, moving here and there as it does with the ever sloping and rising streets. Some day, perhaps I will be able to do the 164 km path called the Cotswold Way, beginning at Chipping Camden, which is the easiest way to really immerse ones self in the interconnected villages that make up this once ancient seabed.

Perhaps a lesser known fact about the Cotswolds is it’s position as an inbetween place, consistently finding itself positioned between two warring sides. One might be surprised by how such an innocent setting could contain the bloody history that it does, and yet sitting between the Welsh lands to the West and the Essex to the East, bordering the Druids to the South on the Salisbury plains and the intruding northern tribes to the North, and most notably being the site of the civil war of the 1600’s.

It’s actually the civil war that becomes most significant to beginning my journey through this area, arriving in the town of Stratford Upon Avon, made notable as the birthplace of William Shakespeare.

If you are like me, Shakespeare represents something of a complicated relationship. A standard text in school, notoriously difficult to grasp, and yet the neverending onslaught of adaptations, stage, screen, and literary, are littered throughout my childhood.

Knowing little about the individual but knowing much about these stories became my window into exploring why he matters, not just to the story of this space, but to my literary pilgrimage. One curious source that accompanied me on this front is called Shakespeare and the Resistance by Clare Asquith. One of the fascinating things that comes from taking a fresh look at common histories is the ways in which perceptions and misconceptions are able to be overturned, which is precisely what Asquith’s well researched treatment of two of Shakespeares famous poems does (Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, published a year apart in the aging and dying years of the Elizabethan era, often sold as Medieval Englands true golden years).

What this window first reveals, which a growing body of research seems to be supporting, is that these golden years overshadow the real political turmoil now buried underneath. This matters to our understanding of England’s history. More so, it matters to our understanding of Shakespeare’s writings, and indeed the person behind the writings. As Asquith writes,

“In shakespeare we discover a man deeply engaged in the struggle to bring true tolerance and humanity to England.”

As she goes on to note, it would be “the change in tone in Shakespeare near the end of his life” which becomes our jumping off point for seeing his body of work through a different set of eyes. This change in tone, while long embedded in different theoretical musings, does reflect a change in demeanor, but what gets missed through handed down histories of the Tudor age is that this change reflects “that of a revolutionary, looking over a failed attemp at resistance towards the Tudor Monarchy.” Just to underscore how deeply this narrative of the Tudors, and subsequently it’s literary figurehead (Shakespeare), has formed the public consciosness of an entire era, Asquith writes about the present state of scholarship, saying:

“Now crumbling, this myth has for centuries formed the foundation stone of an England which dated the birth of its empire and the establishment of its national church back to the days of the Tudors, and adopted Shakespeare as its national figurehead.”

Here, on the cusp of the most bloodied years of England’s illustrious history, two civil wars which would result in the death of nearly 4.5 percent of the population of the British Isles (although more in number, World War 1 sits at 2 percent), sits a now romanticized era of advertised prosperity giving the eventual rebuilding of the British landscape it’s guiding myth, and it is the stories of Shakespeare, purged of it’s political edges, which get reconstituted as its central text.

It’s absolutely worth reading through Asquith’s carefully argued premise, but for the sake of a gross summarization: to truly understand the texts of Shakespeare, one needs to understand how such works operate in times/places of political control. Where texts must be careful in adhering to a given narrative, handed down by the powers, but where writers use the guise of these surface narratives to lobby hidden agendas and critiques of that power in their metaphors and symbols and language. This becomes a way of subverting the powers, precisely because readers of the time pick up on these working metaphors and symbols even where the establishment remains willfully ignorant.

This, Asquith argues, is what gives the change in tone in Shakespeare’s later writings it’s revelatory nature. This reveals the voice of an artist, who spent his life championing a resistance of the Empire and who is now looking upon the failed end result of his efforts: a looming civil war. Here hopeful optimism shifts into a feeling of despair, bringing all manners of existential questions with it regarding the point of it all on the cusp of a life now exiting the stage.

A much different portrait than the Tudor age we’ve been handed over the years. But this is what makes a pilgrimage like this worthwhile. Standing in front of Shakespeeare’s house, walking the streets of his inspiration, gazing over the percieved tensions now apparent in the legacy of the Royal Shakespeare Theater, which was showing the play The Cherry Orchard, starring Helen Hunt and Kenneth Braughn, this very night (perhaps one of my great regrets choosing not to try for last minute tickets to the sold out show, but the price tag was looming large). A legacy that reaches to London and it’s famous Globe, a reconstruction of the very playhouse which once sat on the banks of the River Thames as a grand statement of the Eliabehan era, housing Shakespeares plays.

This inspired me to think back on my own life, given that this pilgrimage marks my official road to 50. What does my life reveal on the surface? And what would my story reveal in light of such revisionist history? This is a question I ask, not because my life resembles anything like Shakespeare’s legacy (about the furthest from it), but because there’s something here that I think applies in important ways to any given life. The tension of existing in a world where we are woven into its constructs, a product of its dominant narratives, often in ways we don’t give much consideration, and yet also being marked by these points of resistance and diversion. We find this in the process of growing up, in the ways our young selves try to wrestle some semblance of our own story out of the expectations of a home, some sense of that sought after independance the differentiates us from our parents and our siblings amidst a shared upbringing. We find this in the ways this percieved independence then faces it’s own challenges of the institutions and expectations which we find in the world on the other side of this transition, on the other side of our “leaving the paramaters of this shared upbringing” seeking the allure of something we can call our own.

I do wonder if sometimes (or often times) I fall into the trap of thinking this act of resistance is, in and of itself, the viritue. Standing here wondering about this storied life, existing now, as it does, a ghost of a never ending reconstruction of the buried past, I consider the ways in which I can begin to see past this mantra I’ve been handed, which says life is just the continued process of opposing the past and replacing it with whatever comes next, and I imagine what it might look like to think more deeply about what a storied life actually means as an actual act of formation rather than simply an othering of the things we feel we must oppose. The ways in which my life, as all lives do, demonstrate this same push and pull that marks Shakespeare’s works, attempting to speak between these larger forces of hope and despair, even as it works to carve out a story in the middle, allowing us to become coherent participants in the plot.

A reality in which things like legacy lay far outside of our control, even as we find ways to believe that our choices, our actions, matter to something bigger than ourselves. A reality where all of our small acts of resistance walk this tightly strung line between forming community and subsequently driving wedges between it.

And then simitaneously asking, for all the ways we are lured in by these acts of resistance, the much more difficult question becomes, what is it that I embrace. This can come in the form of questions such as, what is it that I believe. Or the more probing question, what does my life, a life that is and will be ultimately be controlled by the interpretation of others, reveal about what I believe.

William Shakespeare can’t stand where I am standing now and look back over the long history of interpretaiton that ultimately persists beyond his control. His life, in many ways, is just as much the voice of the Tudors as it is now becoming an act of resistance. Both of these things are true about his legacy. And what hits me, somewhat hard, about recognizing this in this moment, is that in my own 50 years of living this is also true for me.

As something of a cynic I have long wrestled with this tension. As a young child, for whatever reason now lost to the passage of time, I became resltess with this notion of seeking a kind of integrity between my life and what I actually believe to be true about this world. By this I don’t merely mean the old adage of walking the talk, or ideas about ones life matching ones words. That to me is a dangerous moralism. What made me restless ran deeper than this. Something akin to Shakespeare’s adage, “We know what we are, but not what we may be.” It was more about seeing my life in light of a much bigger Truth that exists beyond me, and this insatiable desire and need to know what that Truth is. We know where we are, but not what it might be, that might be another way of rephrasing that.

What kept me awake at night, reading books like Charlotte’s Web and Watershipdown into the late, dark hours, was this unsettled feeling of a lived life that anchors itself in truths that might ultimately prove to be little more than illusions. And I don’t mean simply in the religious sense, but in all of the ways we build our lives on given convictions which drive our choices, which justify the shaping our our lives in our hearts and minds,. and upon which we find meaning and hope. As Shakespeare once said, “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” The issue here is, to be true to thine own self requires alligning ones self with what is true about this world. That’s the restlessness.

Hard questions for an adult mind, let alone for my 7 year old self. Those  who know me understand that I am never far from my next existential crisis. In this moment however, as I continue my walk along the River Avon, the medieval town ebbing and flowing with the different curves and turns of the winding pathway,  I was seeking a conversation between my adult and child self. A way of perhaps probing the nature of this restlessness at its core.

This will come with my ensuing tour of the larger Cotswolds area. There awaits the inspiration of its rich literary heritage, this area inspiring the likes of T.S. Eliot, Tolkien, Beatrix Potter, J.M. Barrie (this is where he wrote Peter Pan), Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll. Each wrestling with these bigger questions in their own way. But in this moment, what Shakespeare is calling me to embrace is this simple recognition: I can be an interpreter of my own life. I can be part of this conversation in the here and now. I don’t need to stay on the surface, I can do the necesary digging. I can learn how to allow the tensions to hand me a life which will likely tell mutliple stories all at once, the same life that, as all lives do, can also be told from multiple perspectives when seen from the numerous eyes looking in from the outside. Each with their own wanted and vested interests in the ways our lives intersect. To be reminded that those perspectives are also beholden to the same process as I am now engaging for my own story, and that I am likewise engaged in telling the stories of others in the same fashion.

Including the ways in which I am interpreting the story of Shakespeare in the here and now. To echo his famous words, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.” And yes, “Lord, what fools these mortals be.”

And maybe, just maybe, we can allow ourselves to concede that Truth has a power all its own. That learning to trust this basic credal confession is the point, something that stands above my life regardless of how much access I have in this present moment to any complete knowledge of it. That learning to trust this confession is perhaps the greatest form of knowledge I can obtain.

What drove Shakespeare was not a rejection of a world bigger than his story, but a deep conviction that it existed. That the simple statement, there is Truth about this world to be obtained in all the ways in which it lays hidden, could motivate him towards challenging the marriage of Empire and Church that brought such bloodshed to his slice of existence. For him, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here,” rings true. And yet his own existential wrestlings utlimately rest on his most famous of sayings, “To be, or not to be, that is the (ultimate) question.” From this flows the ensuing hopeful expression, however much it gets mired by the qeustions of his waning years, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth (insert our names here) than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” With this reminder, I continue to step into the unknown of my own aged years.