I came across this book after I returned (I do not remember now exactly when I read it) and I cried and laughed my way through it. Rudolph so eloquently wrote the truth of some of my experiences. I hope his words will help you understand what I could not quite capture in my blog posts while in the midst of it all.
From Pilgrimage to the End of the World by Conrad Rudolph
"How long is two and a half months? Long enough to trick you into the strange feeling that the even stranger journey you're on is normal, everyday life."
"I always limped now after keeping still for more than a minute or two. It had become so bad that when I got up from dinner in a restaurant, I was always afraid the other guests would think I was drunk, having walked in steadily and stumbled out like a sailor on shore leave. Distinct from this, I had lost feeling in most of my toes, the soles and sides of my feet, and one thigh. My feet had been beaten into submission, to the point that the nerve endings gave up and didn't want to live anymore. They simply turned themselves off, accompanied by four toenails that were pounded off.
I hadn't expected this. I had begun the pilgrimage with calluses on my feet that a Marine would be proud of, the result of long, hard training in the semi-desert of southern California. The trail, however, was as tough as my calluses, and I got blisters under the calluses, where they couldn't be pierced, an excruciating experience that would go on and on until the next full day of hiking in the rain, when the whole thing would explode into an unrecognizable mass of overlapping layers of shredded epidermis and revealed blister upon revealed blister... But I couldn't really complain: a couple of hours' walking left me surprisingly numb to most of the pain."
"Despite the fact that I ate almost twice as much while on the pilgrimage as I do at home, I couldn't eat enough to maintain regular body weight. ... the average day on the pilgrimage is physically harder than the hardest day in the average person's life. Even with the best planning, carrying a pack is the equivalent of lugging a four-year-old child around on your back--uphill, downhill, in the sun, in the rain, through the mud, over unbelievably rocky and uneven trails, all day long, every day, sometimes as long as eleven hours. You get tougher, but the pack doesn't get any lighter."
"The pilgrimage is, above all, an experience, and must be experienced to be understood."
"Being a pilgrim, and especially wearing the pilgrim's shell at all times, is a different sort of experience. You are set apart in a way that's not possible in modern Western culture. ... There is very little of the grotesque commercialism associated with the Santiago pilgrimage that is so readily found at such once-imposing pilgrimage sites as Rocamadour or Mont-Saint-Michel. You are, and eventually feel, very much apart from the rest of the world, a world with which you are familiar, but of which you are not at that moment an immediate part. You are a stranger in a strange land, a pilgrim, one who seemingly has little to do with the life of the places he or she passes through. And yet you have a purpose. A pilgrim is not a tourist...you are not an observer in the traditional sense of the word. ... You are part of the cultural landscape, part of the original reason for being and the history of many of the towns through which you pass...a deeply ingrained part of the identity of the towns and people... Yours is the experience of a fully reconciled alienation: the pilgrim at once the complete insider, the total outsider. This is why the pilgrimage is not a tour, not a vacation, not at all a trip from point A to point B, but a journey that is both an experience and a metaphor rather than an event."
"The physical context is an important part of the pilgrimage. Material expectations are minimal: food, water, a place to sleep. You're never really clean, your clothes are never really clean, and you're rarely truly comfortable...
What there is is an enormous silence and solitude. And the result of all this--not just for me but for all the other long-term pilgrims I spoke with--was a sense a timelessness, or very slowly moving time... I completely lost sense of time and, to a certain extent of space. ... Certainly, this had something to do with both the constant movement and its incredibly slow pace. ... I might come over a ridge and see a city that seemed to be right at my feet, only to find it still half a day off. Or a car might speed by me...and I knew that where that car would be in one hour would take me five days of hard traveling to reach. One of the incredible things about the pilgrimage from Le Puy to Santiago is that, when I was still a whole month of rough trails away, I was excited about how close I was--and, when I was still two weeks away (with some of the hardest trail of the road still ahead), I became almost giddy with anticipation of my imminent arrival."
"The pilgrimage can be a complex thing. ... For most, the goal may be clear: Santiago, even for some of the very few who go on to Finisterre. ... Arriving at Santiago, I may have felt a certain sense of accomplishment, but not completion, in any way. The first sight of the cathedral ...was fun but not emotional."
"The pilgrimage--a tale of storm, rain, heat, cold, sunburn, windburn, hunger, thirst, snakes, rabid dogs, blisters on top of blisters, winds that can stop you dead in your tracks, and knee-grinding and ankle-breaking trails--creates in many an instant nostalgia. Taking the express train out of Santiago with a handful of other pilgrims...it was astonishing to see how excited they became when we went by a clearly marked section of the pilgrimage trail...--and then to notice the sudden silence when a lone pilgrim, slowly walking the trail, came into sight in the distance. On foot, the view was up close and personal. But on the train back, it was striking how distant it had suddenly all become: there was a much broader view now, but one that was totally removed, sheltered, air conditioned. There was no wind, no heat, no bugs, none of the tons of cow droppings, sheep droppings, and goat droppings that the pilgrim daily forges his or her way through. In a car, you're closer, but it might as well be television, you go by at such a great speed and in such a hermetic, self-contained world. There's something about the experience on foot that seems to sharpen or even change the perception, something that's undoubtedly induced in part by its great length and difficulty."
