I am 45, too old to be sent to war. I am Odysseus’s age, and Nelson’s during the long blockading campaign that led to Trafalgar. I should have had my war, but, in common with the rest of my generation, I have avoided it. I have lived my life in a pocket of safety, four and a half decades of deciding where to go on holiday and what car to buy, what book to write, what film to see, what journey to embark on. It has been, in other words, a period in which any kind of courage has not been required. Our belts are loose in a way they haven’t been since - when? Regency England? The Restoration? Our fears are the very opposite of those that have stalked people in the past. We are anxious that life is not dangerous enough; that it bores; that it’s stale; that it lacks ‘dynamism’. We are terrified our existence might be inert or dead.
That was the reason I was here. This oceanic threshold was the source of vitality, strangeness, and gripping seriousness that the ordinary life, the life without challenge, or only the boring, deadening form of challenge normality provides, could never have given me. It stood in for my generation’s missing war.
But this is a subtle and layered area. In many ways, perhaps as far back as the Odyssey, the sea has played the role in the western imagination of the dynamic and lyrical margin, the place whose danger is revelatory, and whose challenge summons the deeper virtues. And, particularly for the English, it is the western sea that does that. The east and south are prose; the west and north the poetic and the exposed. The west is like a descant to the land and its sea surge runs through the veins and arteries of the English imagination. In The Enchafed Flood, W. H. Auden’s series of linked essays on the part played by the sea in the European imagination, he quotes one of Edward Lear’s limericks:
There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,
Who danced a quadrille with a Raven;
But they said - ‘It’s absurd, to encourage this bird!’
So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.
The desire for the sea sets itself against everything that is represented by Edward Lear’s ‘They’. The angry, smashing, strangeness-destroying They; the dinnerparty They; the decayed, normalising, tight, dreary, hypocritical They: all of that is simply absent out here on the Atlantic waters.
If you hope the world is alive, then you should cast off and open the oceanic door. The chart is what matters. On its eastern side, the land with its exactness and its definitions. On the left, the great waters, the realm of openness. ‘If man remains without possibilities,’ wrote Kierkegaard, also quoted by Auden, ‘it’s as if he lacked air.’ Air and possibilities are what this eternally open, western margin has by the bucketload. In reducing you to a sick, stormbound or storm-tossed bit of flotsam, or allowing the threads of self-reliance to develop in you, or the seeds of grit to harden in your gut, the ocean threshold gives you your freedom. As the Scottish writer Alasdair Maclean wrote in Night Falls on Ardnamurchan, the beautiful and bleak elegy to the end of a form of Scottish west-coast consciousness, ‘The physically deprived are the spiritually deprived.’ It is in some ways just a question of room, of expanse, of a felt largeness to life.
But there is something wrong with this. Remoteness, or out-of-touchness, is nowadays a choice rather than a condition. What feels, in one sense, like the deepest of engagements with the real world, the actual physical circumstances on a rocky and at times difficult shore, is in another way the most unreal situation you could imagine, a pretend reality, floating on the huge balloon of cash it takes to get a yacht to sea, disconnected from the serious, adult things that matter - politics, geo-finance, the realities of getting on in the real world.
Maybe our holiday-tasting of this other reality is just an exercise in self-delusion. We can put up with the discomforts of an earlier, very physical existence only for a while before returning to the comforts our real lives provide. There is a salutary remark for all holiday fantasists made by the guru Georges Gurdjieff, the early twentieth-century prophet and teacher who began life as a Greek in the Russian Caucasus and ended it, admired if only half understood, in Paris. The story is set a little earlier in Manhattan. Gurdjieff, speaking English, but his accent as thick as the pelt of an Abkhazian bear and his manner both obscure and broken, was meeting some disciples in a Lower East Side cafe. One was a rich young man who had decided to give it all up, to leave the city and everything the city represented, to abandon all that for a life far away, out in the out-of-touch world where, Thoreau-like, he would bury himself in the deep leaf litter of a natural existence. ‘So, Mr Gurdjieff,’ he asked at the end of his speech, ‘do you think that sounds like a good idea? Do you think that’s the way to go?’
Gurdjieff, master of the pause, a miraculous air of authority hanging about him, delayed and delayed before making his deep and grumblingly important reply. ‘It is a good life,’ he said in his beard, pausing again while the American waited for his destiny to be steered and settled by the man he admired more than any other. ‘Yes, it is a good life,’ Gurdjieff repeated, ‘for a dog.’
Of course he was right. There is something incomplete and slightly doggy about those who have gone to live in deep out-of-touch country, abandoning the urban as too unsettling and too unpredictable. Those dogs who have chosen to live in the furthest flung corners of the world seem slightly reduced by it. It is as if, away from urban pressures, they have gone slack. Their whole existence tends to become jowly, like a sail whose sheets have been loosened. They do not appear liberated or energised by their decision, but made dull by it. We’ve all glimpsed them in off-season Cornish or West Cork bars or, later in the year, with a tan so deep they look as though they have been cured in brine for a couple of months and now have no energy left for anything but reaching for the next cigarette and applying the lighter flame to its tip without the elbow even leaving the surface of the table. They’ve given up talking; they’ve given up the social disciplines that cities represent without really adopting the mores of the places they have adopted. All they can do is growl, wag, and whimper when there is the prospect of food or drink in the air. It is surely no way to go.
My year, as you will have gathered, has been spent exploring these confusions. I understand what Gurdji-eff meant, but I don’t believe that the Gurdjieff slump is the inevitable outcome. I don’t see why choosing to live in a more exposed way than the usual should leave one collapsed and effete, the victim of your own self-indulgences. There is surely a more positive outcome than this?
As the broad arms of the lovely Auk, a washerwoman, a mum, took us north to the wild places, we realized, if we got things right, that I could spend the weekend on the great annual pilgrimage to the top of Croagh Patrick, the scree-covered mountain that stands over 2,500 feet high in the far west of County Mayo, overlooking the islands and channels of Clew Bay. The mountain, on the very borders of the Atlantic, is known locally as the Reek - it looks from a distance like one of the old rounded handmade hayricks one still occasionally sees in the small fields of the west of Ireland - and every year, on the last Sunday in July, a mass of pilgrims toils its way up the rough and stony path to the church on the summit.
There were said to be 60,000 people there that Sunday, and from the little village of Murrisk at the foot of the climb you could see the multicoloured ribbon of them, a three-mile-long piece of bunting, flickering slightly with its own movement, laid out across the long grey stony slopes. The uppermost stretches of the column reached up and disappeared into the mist that clothed the summit, the colours of their clothes absorbed into the grey of the cloud. It was like an image of people ascending to Heaven.
Even that sight, from a distance, was extraordinarily moving: a river of humanity, all ages - grandmothers, four- and five-year-olds; an old man wearing what was clearly his best suit putting one dogged foot in front of another, grindingly slow, holding a thick ashplant and wearing a dairyman’s rubber glove on his hand to protect it from chafing; athletic young men beside him, others clearly past their best, sweating and groaning with the rigours of the climb. At times, particularly when we were enveloped by the mist and rain, and as those descending struggled past those still on their way up, slithering on the loose stones, often haggard with the effort, it felt like a scene from a film of refugee peoples, or a Dantean epic of heaven or hell, vast crowds straining past each other, a broken half-murmur of conversation and encouragement between them, most in silence or near-silence, but some small parties constantly ‘yapping and gobbing’, as one pious woman described it to me. ‘But one must not judge. Even if they are yapping and gobbing, they may still be with the Lord. No, no, one must not judge.’
A very small minority, perhaps one in five hundred or so, were doing the climb without shoes or socks and I joined them barefooted myself. The pilgrimage is said to have been in continuous existence for almost 1,600 years, ever since St Patrick spent forty days and forty nights on the mountain, tempted by the devil and then making a series of bargains with God by which the Irish would be granted special dispensations at the Day of Doom.
Doing the climb in bare feet could be seen as a form of repentance for past sins: one woman I met was suffering the tortures of the shoeless climb not because of anything she felt she might have done herself, but for ‘the sins of the dear departed’. It was her dead husband, she explained, whose wickedness needed accounting for. Another man I walked with, Michael John King, a charming, witty, and deeply religious mountain guide from Clifden, further south on the Atlantic coast, said he had taken his shoes and socks off and exposed his feet to the often needle-sharp rocks of the mountain simply as a kind of thanksgiving for the good things which life had brought him, and for being saved from any accidents in the year that had passed. Another man said he was doing it for world peace. Another because a child of his was afflicted with asthma. And yet another saw it, he said, simply as a means of getting in touch with the nature of the mountain and the meaning of the pilgrimage itself.
That, in some ways the most obscure, was the version that made most sense to me. Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher and writer on the poetics of space, famously wrote: ‘You cannot remember time; you can only remember the places in which time occurs.’ That is the understanding that lies behind all journeys, especially pilgrimage, and particularly a six-hour, increasingly painful pilgrimage up a sharp-edged mountain on the edge of the Atlantic. The pain in the bottom of your feet - ‘God have mercy on your soles’ one man said to me with a toss of the head as he strolled past in his pair of £150 rubber-cushioned mountain boots - and more particularly, perhaps, the ever more delicate care with which you set your feet down on the mountain, picking out the smallest patch of smooth stone in the field of razor-spiked pebbles, is the most effective mnemonic I know. It makes the landscape into a memory machine, so that now, months later in the winter, long after my soles have ceased to burn, I can remember almost literally every step of the way.
But how, you will ask, as I did, can that connect with any aspect of religion? How can pain in the feet have anything to do with a child who has asthma, or a dead husband’s indiscretions, or a relationship to God? The answer is perhaps largely to do with humility. ‘That is a mountain,’ Ernie Sweeney, one of the great talkers of Castlebar, not far from the foot of the mountain, had told me the day before, ‘which glorifies the humble and humbles the glorified.’ More than that, it attempts to use the landscape as a theatre for the relationship between God and man. Hard pilgrimage recognises that the instinct that drove Christ and Patrick and the thousands of other Irish saints into the wilderness is not a historical phenomenon but a religious metaphor that can be perfectly vital now. The barefooted walk up Croagh Patrick, as I thought of it anyway, is an abandoning of comfort for a while as a means of understanding what the world is like. Exposure to the rocks is exposure to the nature of things, and your own hopelessness in relationship to them. Pain shows you how things are. I told Ernie Sweenie, when I came down the mountain, that the pain made me feel like lying down and dying. ‘Well, if you did,’ he said, ‘you’d go straight to heaven like a rocket. There’d be a hole in the ozone layer to show the way you went.’