8) A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

On December 8, 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on a journey that took him from The Hook of Holland to Istanbul. On foot. For eighteen months. He left England when he was eighteen. The first edition of A Time of Gifts, the first of the book chronicling this journey, was published in 1977, the second in 1986 and the third, built from his notes, posthumously in 2013.

There is no other work that I have read that compares to this. It holds an utterly unique place in the world of letters, even though young men walking away from England is not all that unusual, nor was it at the time. Partly it is Fermor's transformation from a relatively gauche teenager in a world that demanded diplomacy and tact, to a young man accustomed to change and shift with the days and nights in barns and castles and different languages every day. There are few joys that compare to his passage on the abbey at Melk (in photos rather like an overgrown muscial box), or his discourse on the way that language creates landscapes in his ears. 

There is nothing about this book that was uncrafted - Fermor did not sit down one fine day in 1975 and just take time jotting down notes and occasionally checking a map. The sentences are deliberate, the structure is chosen and the effect is hypnotizing. So much so that finishing the book I was a bit out of breath and not entirely ready for the next push down the way. (Between the Woods and the Water, btw, is frequently called the best of the three of these books. It is also without peer.)

Herein lie treasures untold.

You know how when you fall in love with an author you search for everything they've written only to find they've written introductions for boatloads of books they didn't write one of them writes the most extraordinary prose? I found Nan Shepherd and Laurie Lee and Edward Thomas through Robert MacFarlane that way. 

That is not what happened here. This book was on the shelving cart and jumped into my hand. I bought it almost immediately.

I love to walk. I have always walked. Usually with a destination in mind, but oh, to walk just to move through a place at the speed of a footstep - what bliss! Anyway, point is, the back of the book said 'walking,' it said something about Europe, and there's an introduction by Jan Morris. 

Books are dangerous tempting things. There are whole worlds in them, frequently hiding in plain sight in your own bland world that isn't bland at all, it's just not roiling with type and paper. I've no wish to go back in time. I've no nostalgia for a world that was still showing scars from a war almost 300 years gone - had I lived there, I think it would be different. There is a specific kind of cynicism in white liberal guilt that lingers even when the guilt is mostly shunted off to more useful pursuits. Like walking. Like meeting people and learning their languages and eating their food and working to repay them and laughing and drinking and dreaming and walking. 

It is a dream that got a foothold somewhere in the first pages of my first reading of this book. Walking. Days and weeks and months of walking. It is an old dream; A Time of Gifts gave it new life. Nostalgia is not what lies on a walking path no matter old it is. History is underfoot, not some illusion. Fermor interacts with that history all along the Danube, the river that is almost a companion on his journey. He meets Romani ('Gypsies') all along the way, especially as he moves south from Germany. I think of how soon they will be hunted in his time frame. How many of the people that he met will not live through the war. 

This is a travelogue that leaves me with sore feet and the need to wash the road I have not walked off a face that hasn't been outside for the better part of several hours. It gives me the world if only I will tie my shoelaces and go.