Book Review: Stones on the Pathway

Title: Stones on the Pathway

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Author: David Bamford

Date: 2023

ISBN: 978-1-815729-50-9

Quote: "A stone may be an obstacle...It can also be a thing of beauty."

Future historians may note the current wave of COVID books as a genre. This is a COVID book.

In the years 2020-2022 an Englishman of retirement age wanted to make the historic pilgrimage walking tours along the routes established by at least two medieval saints, Kentigern and James of Compostela. He had some setbacks and frustrations along the way--physical injuries that interfered with long walks, and the COVID panic. He passed some of the lonely hours writing poems.

Not as many hours as he might have done. The 2020 poems contain many wails about how tedious days of "social distance" are, even though he meets people on his walks and can speak to them from a decent social distance as easily as ever. What can he do with all this lonely time at home? Well, one possibility would have been to polish his poems, bring the visual details into focus for the reader, find some sort of pattern that distinguishes his poems from his prose. 

Another possibility would be to consider the question of why he suffers so much from extroversion at the same time that he wants to do things introverts do: be a gardener, write poems, walk a pilgrimage route. Extroverts typically like to feel that they can do these things too, but they don't have that deep desire to do them as well. It's always interesting to find out whether "creative" people who identify as extroverts can remember the fever or concussion that left them feeling "more outgoing," and to what degree their talents, including the definitive gift of that clear internal sense of right and wrong, have survived. Did Bamford always suffer from such abject fear of being alone, or being prevented from literally grabbing for control of others' attention? 

Do introverts really need to try to work up empathy for extroverts when we get these glimpses into the troubles of their minds? Well...have they ever shown any real empathy toward us? I don't feel terribly guilty about my reaction to these poems of insight into the extrovert brain. They are much more like "Eww ick" than like "Oh, that's easy to understand." I do feel sorry for extroverts, but I don't believe any more indulgence is likely to help them. They need the discipline of making social distance a wya of life. 

In one poem that's not specifically COVID-related Bamford frets about the lack of words that are acceptable, in England at least, for calling people one does not know well. He feels awkward about addressing groups as "mates" or "gentlemen," and he dislikes "guys." It does not seem to occur to him that the reason why a sensitive ear hears flaws in all the words that have been used to call strangers because people are not meant to make a habit of calling strangers at all. When calling out to strangers is appropriate the right words to use are not names to call the strangers. They are words like "Fire!" or "Man overboard!" 

His angst decreases as he writes about places where he walks: a ruined castle, an old stone bridge being rebuilt with fresh mortar, a field full of lambs, a beach, a field of rabe (he spells it "rape" and doesn't seem to have heard the good news that it was, before the turn of the century, ruled acceptable to call the stuff canola). He describes even the demanding pilgrimage to Compostela in terms of people who talk to him on the way, At the end of the pilgrimage to Compostela, he suggests that the pilgrims are all wondering "what next>: and he answers this question by going back to Britain and writing about his resolutions to think kind thoughts and speak kind words.

There's nothing at allk preachy about this book apart from the basic fact that the author attends a church and walks routes associated with Christian saints. Bamfor dopesn't write much about the saints but he does write about the poeple who say "Buen camino" rather than "Buenos dias" when met on the road to Compostela. 

Extroverts may well like this book as a collection of "poems" that "sound just like real conversation, not forced into some sort of fancy pattern." Introverts may like it most for its insights into the deficiencies of the extrovert brain. We found plenty to do during the COVID lockdowns, thanks all the same, though few of us were able to make money doing those things. It is, in any case, also a testimony to the everyday quality of the Christian life; nothing in this book excludes people who are not Christians from sharing Bamford's experience, but, at the end of the day, he is...