Traveling Souls: Contemporary Pilgrimage Stories

By Brian Bouldrey

"Reading the wonderfully varied and unexpected stories assembled here, I was struck by how much the notion of pilgrimage today has to do with retrieving a sense of purpose (and simplicity, and constancy); with putting oneself, quite literally, in the footsteps of the past. Once upon a less secular time, almost everyone made pilgrimages, and most of the great works of our early literature -- Dante's ascent into the stars, Chaucer's wanderers to Canterbury, the tales of Orpheus and Odysseus and Hercules -- commemorate both inward and outward journeys; these days, I suspect, many of us travel in part to experience pilgrimage by proxy. Most of the travellers in this volume leave home, as I have done, to partake of someone else's pilgrimage, and so to learn what animates people to undertake such sacrificial tasks; the destination of pilgrimage is pilgrimage itself." -- Taken from the foreword by Pico Iyer.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1883513081
• ISBN13: 9781883513085
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Whereabouts Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Beautifully written

From Pico Iyer's igniting forward and carried throughout the book by each storyteller, the book propels you forward into places and circumstances that most of us will never witness or experience. The book itself is an internal pilgrimage - a collection of color, culture, time and timelessness.. wrapped into a single text.