Day 24- Châteauvillain to Mormant

Like clay in the hands of the potter, so are you in my hand, says the Lord  (Jeremiah 18:6)

Tuesday 24/04/2018

Distance 19.1km Total Distance from Canterbury 592.6km

From Chateauvillain to Mormant was not very far. It was one of the quietest days I have had and i have had quite a few already! I knew I was going to stop at a B&B in Mormant, so no anxieties about accommodation and no hurry.

Before I left my ‘council flat’ I went out and found the boulangerie. Not the one where I picked up the key, but another one nearer to home. It is good to spread your custom. Here is what I bought.

Please note that I knew with certainty I would not see another shop or bar for over 24 hours. And I didn’t eat it all at once.

So without any retail distractions, a day to think and observe, most of it spent walking through the Forest of Chateauvillain, which was not the type of forest you get lost in. Forests divide up about fifty-fifty in this respect. And a special treat of not walking through much habitation is that there were very few noisy dogs, which always seem to interrupt the quietest moments. Just a few photos to give you and idea of the beauty of the landscape.

There are people who are famous for one thing and are also famous for something entirely different and unrelated. Sir Roger Bannister, who died a few weeks ago, was one of the most eminent doctors in the UK and specialised in Neurology. He made hugely important contributions to research and clinical management. He inherited the mantle of another outstanding neurologist, The Right Honourable the Lord Brain. Lord Brain wrote the medical textbook with the best name, I think, Brain’s Diseases of the Nervous System. Roger Bannister took over the editorship of another of his books, which came to be known as Brain and Bannister’s Clinical Neurology. As an aside I will tell you my favourite line in any medical textbook that I have read, and I have read more than a few. The only indication for tinted lenses is to shield a frail psyche from the world. (‘Indication’ is used here in the technical medical sense, meaning a reason to prescribe.) It comes from Lecture Notes on Ophthalmology by Patrick Trevor-Roper, the brother of the very famous and often controversial historian, Hugh, who became Lord Dacre. I am not saying that I agree with the statement about tinted lenses. In fact, I don’t think it is true. But I like forthrightness. If you are writing your own textbook you can get away with including a little prejudice. (The same applies when you are writing a blog.) I do not propose to enter into any discussion about tinted lenses, even from Bono.

Roger Bannister is also famous for an entirely different reason. He was the first person to run an Imperial mile in less than 4 minutes, which he did while he was a medical student at Oxford. I never have any trouble remembering the exact date – May 6th 1954 as it is the birthday of my closest (twin) cousins with whom I went to school. (Greetings P&K. As I agreed with Mr et Madame Songy at Coole, 1954 was a VERY good year!)

I was taught in Liverpool by Irish Christian Brothers. One of them used to go out for a walk every day and got friendly with a neighbour, an old Scotsman whom he used to meet walking his dog. The other Brothers would hear stories of their chats and he became known to them vicariously as the little old Scotsman. After some time the Brother invited him to come back to the house for a cup of tea. The other Brothers were startled to find that the little Scotsman was Bill Shankly. Bill Shankly was famous as one of the most successful football managers of the 20th century. He managed Liverpool for fifteen years during which time they won three League Championships, the FA Cup twice, and the UEFA cup. All of which meant nothing to the Brother who invited him for tea!

He is also remembered for a particular statement, with the same individual tone as Patrick Trevor-Roper’s. He said:  Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.

Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) was a Hollywood  actress, although she had been born in Vienna. Louis B Mayer brought her to Hollywood in the 1930s. She played Delilah in the film Samson and Delilah, the highest grossing film of 1950 and at the time the third highest grossing film ever.

The idea of humanity being formed from the dust of the earth is found not only in the first pages of the Bible, but also in the ‘Creation Myths’ of other ancient civilisations. ‘Myths’ is used in a technical sense here, not to imply something which is untrue, but as something which aims to express a fundamental truth. It seems to be an idea which has had a lot of traction over the millennia. Genesis 2:7 puts it thus: then the Lord God formed the man out of the dust of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. Similar ideas can be found in ancient Greek mythology, in the Babylonian Enuma Elish, in the Quran, in Chinese stories and elsewhere. In the New Testament St Paul uses a similar image in the Second Letter to the Corinthians: We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. (2 Cor 4:7)

The idea that we are clay, dust, soil of the earth is fundamental. The Hebrew of Genesis text contains a play on words. Adam was the name of the man, and adamah means earth. So Adam was ‘taken out of’ the earth.

Quite off the point, but while you are at that end of the bible you might like to ponder that in Genesis 1:29 God gave humanity every tree, and seed and green plant of the earth for food.  Then we had the flood, and Noah. And then after the flood, something new. God said to Noah in Genesis 9:3 Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. Again, I am NOT going to enter into discussion about this move from vegetarianism to omnivourism. It was fortunate timing though for the animals that had come in two-by-two.

So today I walked slowly and purposefully but gently over the earth, surrounded by flowers and trees.

John O’Donohue, (1956-2008), who died just over ten years ago was an Irish poet, priest and philosopher. He was a very serious philosopher, an expert on Hegel, and Meister Eckhart. He came from the west of Ireland, an area renowned for its natural beauty. And Les Lacs de Connemara, if you remember. He is most widely known in Ireland for his writings, and his first book Anam Cara (which means Soul Friend) was published in 1997 and became an international best seller.  Four or five other books followed, of prose and poetry. He writes on profound issues, often very simply. His thoughts are triggered by light or water, or greenery, or a hill or a donkey. He had an enormous love for creation in its broadest sense. If you have never come across him, his most approachable work I think is one he didn’t actually write (like Ferdinand de Saussure). It is called Walking on the Pastures of Wonder and came out a couple of years ago and is a collection of transcripts, mainly of radio talks and interviews, put together by John Quinn. Officially it is only available in Ireland, but you can buy it easily on bookdepository.com  ‘Walking on the pastures of wonder’ is what children do all the time, before sophistication steps in.

I have a review copy and it is heavily annotated and underlined by me, but my some of my favourite lines are these:  I love mountains. I feel that mountains are huge contemplatives. They are there and they are in the presence up to their necks and they are still in it and with it and within it. One of the lovely ways to pray is to to take your body out into the landscape and to be still in it. Your body is made out of clay, so your body is actually a miniature landscape that has got up from under the earth and is now walking on the normal landscape. If you go out for several hours into a place that is wild, your mind begins to slow down, down, down. What is happening is that the clay or your body is retrieving its own sense of sisterhood with the great clay of the landscape.

There is a meaningful quote on every page. And a remarkable way of moving from talking about an ant  in one line and God in the next. And that is how I occupied myself on the quiet and deserted road to Mormant.

So for what else is John O’Donohue famous? He is famous for making the worst will in recent Irish legal history. And he did this by trying to make it simple. It ended in a High Court hearing which had to be brought forward urgently as his mother was terminally ill at the time. It may interest you to read the judge’s summary here. It is simple enough and he explains the problems and his conclusions clearly.

Here is the key passage:  The Testator has unfortunately provided an illustration of exactly how a person should not make a will. While there can be little doubt but that the Testator was a man of considerable learning, the fact that he did not benefit from legal advice or assistance is evident from the will he drew up. Not only was it deficient in terms of the lack of certainty as to his intention but moreover he unwittingly made the classic error of having two of the intended beneficiaries act as witnesses to his signature, thereby depriving both as a matter of law from benefiting under the terms of the will.

The will was pronounced valid but void for uncertainty. This meant he died intestate. His mother then became the sole beneficiary. She died a few weeks after this determination. The case is I presume used in Law Schools. And it should encourage us all to get our will made by a professional.