The Crossway, Guy Stagg
It took me a long time to read this book, but the more it took the more I kept coming back to it in search of peace and of slowness. The narrator departs on a pilgrimage on Via Egnatia, an old Roman road to Jerusalem, without being devout, but with the idea that an endeavour of this scale could save him from the depression that almost undid him. Descriptions of the day’s walk are interspersed with the history of the places he traverses or takes shelter in, monasteries, old churches, houses of priests. The whole concept of it shocked me, an introvert with intense social anxiety. How can anyone have the courage to start a journey like this and expect the kindness of people to give him a bed and maybe something to eat? It was surreal to me, impossible. The pilgrim himself was surprised and warmed by the welcome he received everywhere, by the way people were curious to understand his journey and in return for his attention to their life stories. People are hungry to tell you about themselves, I’ve learned this mostly from uber drivers who’ve recounted their whole lives to me many times without any prompting, the simple fact of my being in the backseat was enough, so in the case of this pilgrim, already in an unusual situation, the confessions poured out of people.
It’s a journey of faith, but not in God or some Christian denomination, rather in the restorative nature of an effort, of a hard undertaking. The narrator is animated by a bit of magical thinking in his expectation to find the inefable perspective, the tools that can keep him in the world and functioning as a normal person.
The descriptions are stirring in their beauty and colour, they lay bare the hope or hopelessness of the modern pilgrim, his assumptions and mistakes, his inner quest.
I kept coming back to walk with him through changing landscapes because I felt infused by his solitude and courage, the clarity of moving towards a destination, the sense of purpose, the tranquility of advancing one step at a time and immersing myself in everything around, as he did. It’s a book I’ll remember for a long time.
Book mood: solitude, searching for answers, quest, pilgrimage
What I’ll steal: I imagine the amount of detail in this memoir was because of how much the author wrote during his journey. Keeping a journal has always been fraught for me, I’d like to do it and yet I can’t find a right way to do it.
Want, Lynn Steger Strong
I read this so quickly. It was short, true, but it was more than that. A certain flow helped me glide through the sentences, to care about some people I wouldn’t care in general because they’re too mundane. I don’t like mundane. An Ivy League graduate, mother of two little children talks about her life. Nothing much happens and a lot happens at the same time. Restlessness, poverty, tiredness, the despair of the modern life, the despair of the job market, are the backdrop of constantly resurfacing old betrayals and failures. Long lost friends, that you never forget or truly extricate yourself from loving, an extended family that amounts to nothing more than a threat. The tragic, unending pilgrimage of poverty. I unexpectedly enjoyed it. It didn’t even make my own anxiety worse. Good writing does that in many cases, it allows you to witness something without overwhelming you.
Book mood: anxious with a dash of oppressive, capitalist bankruptcy, the tediousness of modern life, the tragedy of it
What I’ll steal: there wasn’t anything complicated about the way this was written, and yet it worked so well by simply going through the motions because this is what the character does, the matter of fact way in which detail comes after detail to build the story, strengthened what I keep forgetting, it’s not about artifice but about honesty, about truth, or at least one truth, that of the narrator.