Traveling Souls Contemporary Pilgrimage Stories |
|
Author:
| Bouldrey, Brian Iyer, Pico |
Contribution by:
| Barrett, Marvin Cushman, Anne Ehrlich, Gretel Kadish, Rachel Kumar, Satish Lash, Jennifer Mason, Alane Salierno Mitchell, John Hanson Nabhan, Gary Paul Seymour, Abigail Statler, Oliver Walker, Alice Wilson, Barbara Wolfe, Michael Malcolm X, |
ISBN: | 978-1-883513-08-5 |
Publication Date: | Jan 1999 |
Publisher: | Whereabouts Press
|
Book Format: | Paperback |
List Price: | AUD $24.95 |
Book Description:
|
"Reading the wonderfully varied and unexpected stories assembled here, I was struck by how much the notion of pilgrimage today has to do with retrieving a sense of purpose (and simplicity, and constancy); with putting oneself, quite literally, in the footsteps of the past. Once upon a less secular time, almost everyone made pilgrimages, and most of the great works of our early literature -- Dante's ascent into the stars, Chaucer's wanderers to Canterbury, the tales of Orpheus and...
More Description"Reading the wonderfully varied and unexpected stories assembled here, I was struck by how much the notion of pilgrimage today has to do with retrieving a sense of purpose (and simplicity, and constancy); with putting oneself, quite literally, in the footsteps of the past. Once upon a less secular time, almost everyone made pilgrimages, and most of the great works of our early literature -- Dante's ascent into the stars, Chaucer's wanderers to Canterbury, the tales of Orpheus and Odysseus and Hercules -- commemorate both inward and outward journeys; these days, I suspect, many of us travel in part to experience pilgrimage by proxy. Most of the travellers in this volume leave home, as I have done, to partake of someone else's pilgrimage, and so to learn what animates people to undertake such sacrificial tasks; the destination of pilgrimage is pilgrimage itself." -- Taken from the foreword by Pico Iyer.