“Roads are like furrows,” the great Portuguese writer Alvaro Cunqueiro states. “As furrows produce wheat, so do roads produce people, inns, languages, nations. With a road, you can travel along it, or sit beside it and take your harvest in. This road I am talking about now is rather like an old beggar, even though each traveller who treads it renews it, and manages to revive some portion of early youth on its broken, dusty surface.”
Much like Cunqueiro’s description of this particular road, I have read and re-read his master work Merlin and Company many times. Every time I return to it, I find something else to enjoy about it, or take insight from; even though it was published long ago now in 1955.
It is much the same with all the books, poems and authors I most enjoy– I am forever returning to them, be it after a year or a decade.
One day I have a dream to tour the hometowns of all my favourite authors, to find one of those park bench statues dedicated to them, and sit there in their effigies' company for a time in gratitude for all the hours, days and years of enjoyment I have taken from their works.
I did have that chance in 2007 for one of those authors, Dylan Thomas, in Swansea. I sat on the bench beside him at the marina where his statue is and we looked out at the sailboats together for an hour.
No poet in any language will ever beat his line, “Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand, in the moon that is always rising. Nor that riding to sleep I should hear him fly with the high fields, and wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.”
So he is one checked off my list. However, that still leaves Cunqueiro in Mondoñedo, Shakespeare in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Gabriel Garcia Márquez in Aracataca, Wallace Stevens in Hartford, Paul Éluard in Luxembourg, Rumi in Konya, and, in the more distant future, Haruki Murakami in Kyoto and Jostein Gaarder in Oslo.
One day, I know this journey of pilgrimage will be great, and the road fruitful.
