After finishing my first shift of the day, yesterday, I went back to Sawtry, where I’d been delivering earlier. I’d planned to stop in a tea room. But it was shut.
But prior to discovering this, I found a shop, near where I eventually managed to park. And in said charity shop I bought Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels With A Donkey, for thirty pence!
In the end I didn’t start reading this new and fab little book til much later in the day. Indeed, after completing a second shift. This second shift I’d felt obliged to book/do, to fund the recent acquisition of William Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books.
Bob died very suddenly aged just 44, from a heart-attack, on the Samoan Isles, where he’s buried. Leaving behind a fantastic literary legacy, including such legendary titles as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Dr Jekyll & My Hyde, amongst many others.
The above passage, like a lot of Stevenson’s writing, is stuffed to bursting with insight, and quotable words: ‘exulting in my solitude’! The bit about ‘one of those truths…’ is fab, with the mystic’s appeal to instinctual knowledge or insight over the dusty pronouncements of the learnèd.
And then the pure gold of the passage ‘there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude… rightly understood, is solitude made perfect…’ Bob, I love ya’!
Travels With A Donkey was written as the author made his titular trip through The Cevennes, in France. He was ministering to his heartache, his lady of that time having left him to return to the U.S.
Every day he’s studiously write up what he’d experienced in the last 24 hours, whether he was at an inn, or in ‘God’s Hotel’, under the stars. And what he writes is wonderfully enchanting.
He starts out by buying Modestine, the she-ass of the book’s title. His relationship with her is fascinating. Evolving from embarrassed naivety to experienced disdain pretty rapidly. But all the while retaining a compassionate humanity towards his beast of burden.
As well as narrating what the landscapes, weather and people are like, as he travels, he also: indulges in philosophical speculation; tales a lot about religion/God, etc; and even gives us some local history, most notably regarding the revolt of The Camisards, 180 years prior to his travels.
He stays in a Catholic retreat at one point. And several simple country inns. But he seems happiest on those nights when sleeping outdoors, in a kind of proto-bobby-bag, manufactured at the start of the trip to his own specifications.
He comes over as a very affable if slightly patronisingly sort. To his great credit, he is publicly humble, whilst reserving his ‘loftier’ judgements for the ‘privacy’ of his journaling. Which then, ironically, perhaps, he publishes!
As the little photo extracts that pepper this post show, he is eminently quotable. And eloquently and succinctly expresses things in a straightforward way. A way that has traversed the passage of intervening time very well.
When, at journeys end, he parts with Modestine, it’s quite moving, in an unexpected and humble way. Indeed, it moved me to compose a poem on the subject. I’ll most likely share that elsewhere, at another time. But one word on it here; unlike most of my poems, which are entirely (so far as I know) my own words, Farewell, Modestine uses a lot of RLS, for brickwork, with me adding only the necessary cement.
As with much of the best writing, reading his promotes a desire to read more by the author. Having read Treasure Island and Kidnapped as a child, methinks my next RLS port of call ought to be Dr Jeckyll & Mr Hyde.
