Wednesday Links

An idyllic summer in Brittany, WORLD’s expanded books section, a new take on Alexander the Great, and more.

La Maison Rose or “Le Brénéguy,” Locmariaquer, France.

Good morning! All travel is a kind of pilgrimage, Tara Isabella Burton argues in The Hedgehog Review, because it is “so often geared toward . . . transformation”: “Spain’s Camino de Santiago—which saw its first politicized resurgence in the mid–twentieth century under the propagandistic Catholic dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco—has reinvented itself as a destination not only for Catholic pilgrims but for hikers, bikers, backpackers, and the ever-increasing ranks of those categorized as “spiritual but not religious.” In 2019, a prepandemic record was set when almost 350,000 hikers received their certification of completion, granted to those who finish the final fifty-odd continuous miles of the trail in a week. Of these, 60 percent denied that their motivation was religious—at least by the conventional standards of organized religion. Yet when I walked a portion of the Camino last year—not as a pilgrim proper, but as a pilgrimage-curious lecturer working on a group hiking tour for National Geographic—the vast majority of the people I met on the trail understood themselves to be, if not pilgrims in a technical sense, travelers on a spiritually significant journey of some kind . . . But if there was little obvious distinction between ‘religious’ pilgrims and ‘regular’ travelers, it was partly because the discourse of contemporary travel is so often geared toward the same ends as pilgrimage proper: a journey that results in the transformation, and ideally purification, of the searching self.”