"The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry"

[fiefoe]

So much for my hope to stay away from books that deal with death. As a tale of a man walking, it recalls Belloc's "A Path to Rome", and Rachel Joyce really gets the physicality and the interiority of long lone walks right. (Are there books about single woman walking though?) Sadly Harold didn't often have cheerful thoughts to think about, ("When I was a boy, my parents didn’t want me. Then, later on in my life, I met my wife and we had a child. That went wrong too.") and the reader suffers along (and also found reaching the end elusively rewarding.)

• Maureen gave a swallow that smacked the silence. / In the beating silence
• There was a pause and Rex poured a sigh into it. / thrill of landing her attention
• Sometimes, though, there was an object that he didn’t expect; a porcelain figure, or a vase, and even a tuba. The tender pieces of themselves that people staked as boundaries against the outside world.
• Was this how it went? That just at the moment when he wanted to do something, it was too late? That all the pieces of a life must eventually be surrendered, as if in truth they amounted to nothing?
• His shirt, tie, and trousers were folded small as an apology on a faded blue-velvet chair.
• they had made a decision in their hearts and minds to ignore the evidence and to imagine something bigger and something infinitely more beautiful than the obvious.
• He had to stop to look. There were so many shades of green Harold was humbled. Some were almost a deep velvety black, others so light they verged on yellow. Far away the sun caught a passing car, maybe a window, and the light trembled across the hills like a fallen star.
• Sometimes she cleaned the bits she had just cleaned. It wasn’t like living in a house, but more a question of hovering over the surfaces.
• points of light dropped on the sea like rain,
• But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are.
• a slow inner rhythm that the fury of the city now threatened to overturn.
• People were buying milk, or filling their cars with petrol, or even posting letters. And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The inhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that.
• In walking, he freed the past that he had spent twenty years seeking to avoid, and now it chattered and played through his head with a wild energy that was its own. He no longer saw distance in terms of miles. He measured it with his remembering.
• He stopped referring to his guidebooks because the gap between their sense of knowing and his own of not knowing was too unbearable.
• as if the walk and his belief in it had broken into two separate pieces, and he was left only with the relentless slog.
• If he kept looking at the things that were bigger than himself, he knew he would make it to Berwick.
• Walking the road already traveled was even harder. It was like not moving at all. It was worse, like eating into a part of himself.
• Every month the house smelled of new scent. There was always different underwear on the washing line. I used to lie on the grass, looking up. I had never seen anything so beautiful.
• bluebells spread thick like water through the woodlands.
• Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways. You could think you were starting something afresh, when actually what you were doing was carrying on as before.
• Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.
• Walking into the dawn, he watched with wonder as the sky flamed with strong color and then faded to a single blue. It was like being in an altogether different version of the day, one that held nothing ordinary.
• “Pull it out. Go on. Have a proper look, Maureen. I made it for you.” It was a giant-sized map of England mounted on pin board.
• After that she paired each of her outfits with one of his. She tucked the cuff of her blouse in his blue suit pocket.
• The air was drenched with such birdsong and life, it was like standing in rain.
• Again he felt in a profound way that he was both inside and outside what he saw; that he was both connected, and passing through. Harold began to understand that this was also the truth about his walk. He was both a part of things, and not.
• He saw that when a person becomes estranged from the things they know, and is a passerby, strange things take on a new significance. And knowing this, it seemed important to allow himself to be true to the instincts that made him Harold, as opposed to anyone else.
• Being alone required such constant effort.
• If it was sunny, there could be a crowd. Campaigners, ramblers, families, dropouts, tourists, musicians. There were banners, campfires, debates, physical warm-ups, and music.
• The gorilla man was badly stung while taking notes for Rich when it transpired there was a wasp in his glove.
• leaving the moon so pale it looked made of cloud.
• Maureen gave a shrill laugh that sounded as if she had just emptied it out of a packet.
• unobserved, and yet tender for the strangeness of others.
• He couldn’t remember which muscles served which limbs. He couldn’t remember how it would help.
• coming to terms once more with how utterly the life vanishes.