Pilgrimage in the West has spun, like education, away from the church. It seems to me no longer a Christian but a now secular notion. The by now clichéd gap year can be seen as pilgrimage. The journey is a rite of passage in a world of fast disappearing ritual and tradition. As I wandered past these artefacts of pilgrims past I expected Lonely Planet guides, backpacks and a Eurail pass to appear, amongst the artefacts of pilgrims present.
A Passage to India
(with apologies to E.M. Forster)
“The brown skins, the bare feet, the nose-rings, the humped bullocks – all these things were foreseeable, seemed obvious and familiar from the moment of landing. The really odd, unexpected thing about Bombay was its birds. There are more birds in the streets of this million-peopled city than in an English woodland.”
Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate: An Intellectual Holiday
A man unrolled his patterned carpet beside a metal detector. Neatly dressed, in a wool suit, he would, like us, soon leave Amman from the city’s international airport. He raised his open hands to shoulder level, looked up through simply framed spectacles, and bent from the knee, down, until his head and hands touched the floor. I recorded him in my journal, amongst other, final impressions of the Middle East: of people praying publicly, next to taxis and behind shop counters, oblivious to customers waiting to be served, outside full mosques on Friday and on the edge of a felucca, divining Mecca through a long relationship with the Nile. Three months before, I might have panicked. Airport, metal detector, Muslim. But I recorded no fear; what I wrote, instead, was a conclusion. Continue reading A Passage to India
(with apologies to E.M. Forster)>>
