santiago de compostela
Background: A few years ago, when I was just starting my year abroad in Barcelona, after a week of settling into our apartments and host families there, the university program organized a trip for us all to go to Santiago de Compostela. On the other side of Spain, in Galicia, the city is still the destination for thousands of pilgrims (religious and athletic now, frankly) who walk there from as far as Paris on the “Camino de Santiago.” It’s something I’ve always wanted to do myself (you can spend up to 40 days doing it, depending where you start), but that’s a different story. Anyway, this is the beginning of something I wrote about the experience of visiting the city then.
The rays of the sun fell in thick beams at 45 degree angles. In the plaza to the side of the Cathedral, space was cut by these diagonals, warm spring sunshine and the cool, damp, contemplative soul of the city. The quiet experience of the religious pilgrimage itself, and the joy of finally arriving, as told by the weather in this mythic city. We hadn’t been pilgrims, of course, we weren’t completely entitled to this experience. Peeking in the church’s doors this morning, to see an overwhelming, surprising gloom, incense burners swinging solemnly, it had felt like looking in on a stranger’s wedding: familiar, but it was not for us. So we moved along, as if embarrassed by our arrival here, not by foot but by plane. We continued our vuelta around the small, hilly city.
There was a slight tension in our interactions, because this was the end of the beginning of our experience — we would soon be returning to what was now becoming familiar, we didn’t need our maps any longer to navigate between our new homes and the university. And so, the closeness that newness bred among us would be no longer. Whom we saw and spoke to would now be by our choice, rather than just a given, and there’s a sort of sadness in this expression of free will: I think in a way most of us sort of like being stuck even with the people we don’t like very much, because it gives us the freedom to respond to people in a whole range of ways. To have the conversations we wouldn’t usually have. Being surrounded by only the things we have chosen, the process of choosing even, can be exhausting. Maybe we don’t really like what we like, or we don’t know what we like — is this why we revel in telling the stories of meetings completely by chance, why we continue to set up and agree to blind dates, putting our choices in others’ or nobody’s hands?
So it was with these ideas, not thought out but rolled up inside of us, felt to different degrees, that we settled to one of our last big group lunches in the open air of the small plaza, not with our “friends,” but just with whoever was there. We arranged ourselves at a long row of dinky metal tables, in uncomfortable chairs, unbalanced, rocking back and forth with every shift of our weight.
