Walking with Plato (28 page)

Perranporth YHA is situated south of the town, perched upon a grassy cliff-top overlooking Perran Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. It’s compact, basic, and perhaps even a little shabby, but it’s also comfortable and welcoming.

We spent a deliciously long evening there, sitting in cosy chairs by the window, looking back upon the long and happy journey that had brought us to Perranporth from John o’Groats, and looking ahead to the short journey that would bring us, all too quickly, to Land’s End.

Our thirteen-mile hike from Perranporth to the YHA at
Portreath
began in dramatic fashion with a winding cliff-top walk, through gorse and heather, and past chimneys, disused mineshafts, and other relics of the Cornish tin-mining industry. After that, the path continued to twist and turn along the contour of the cliff, so that the view constantly shifted between sea and land and shoreline.

By this time, with the end of our three-month journey fast approaching, each walk was something to be savoured. We were conscious that these glorious Indian-summer days, these days of fresh air and freedom, these days of
dolce
far
niente
(literally, ‘sweet doing nothing’), would soon be over.

As we were now very fit and well adapted to the rigours of the walk, we found ourselves eating up the trail on the SWCP at immense speed.

In the early days of JoGLE, on the road to Inverness, we had naturally adopted a slow, plodding style of walking. But, as the weeks and months had progressed, our walking style had evolved into something so fast and efficient that it bordered on a jog.

This is a very pleasant way to move. It gets the lungs working and the heart beating, and it makes you feel full of energy and full of life. But it can also make a modest-distance walk feel disappointingly short.

So, to make the final stages of JoGLE last as long as possible, we included plenty of stops. On this day, we stopped for beers at Trevaunance Cove, stopped for ice-creams at Chapel Porth, and stopped to enjoy the sunshine on numerous benches, beaches, and boulders en route. Even so, the miles flew by.

Before we knew it, we had left behind the flowering heather and gorse, the narrow paths winding prettily across undulating moorland, the granite cliffs and grassy slopes, the steep-sided rocky inlets, and the gentle breakers scudding across the surface of sandy beaches.

We arrived, late in the afternoon, at the fishing village of Portreath, and from there took a mile-and-a-half detour off the SWCP to Portreath YHA, a converted barn in the grounds of a working farm.

As it was midweek and late in the season, we had the hostel to ourselves. During the long evening, our thoughts and conversation returned, again and again, to the same theme: the nearness of our journey’s end.

It was strange, now, for me to think back to the first stage of JoGLE, when each day’s walk had seemed too long and too hard, and when Land’s End couldn’t come soon enough for my liking.

I never imagined, back then, that the time would come when the days’ walks would seem too short and almost too easy, and when Land’s End would seem to be approaching all too fast.

Back then, I had regarded JoGLE as a challenge to be completed, an obstacle to be overcome. I little thought that the time would come when I would think of it not as a means to an end but as an end in itself, not as an obstacle to be overcome but as an experience to be savoured.

I never dreamed that I would come to regard it – to use Rousseau’s phrase – as ‘the height of happiness’.

The following day, we enjoyed another unseasonably warm and sunny hike along another magnificent stretch of the South West Coast Path. This time, our route ran seventeen miles from Portreath to the popular holiday resort of
St Ives
.

For the first five or six miles, the path wove in and out of small headlands, and past coves, stacks, and islands with splendid names such as Ralph’s Cupboard, Deadman’s Cove, and Hell’s Mouth.

This cliff-top-hugging section ended at Godrevy Head, a large square promontory overlooking Godrevy Island with its lighthouse, which is said to have been the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s novel
To the Lighthouse
.

From there, the path headed southwest across sand dunes to the mouth of the River Hayle, and then took a long, almost circular, detour around the muddy flats of the Hayle estuary before heading northwest into St Ives.

The detour around the estuary contributed about four miles to our day’s tally. These were welcome extra miles, since by now we were keen to prolong each walk and hold on, for as long as we reasonably could, to our JoGLE experience.

But, despite the detours and the tea-stops and the view-stops, I was acutely conscious that our journey was drawing swiftly and inexorably to a close, that only two days’ walking remained.

It was a sad thought. But it was a sadness tinged with sweetness.

I remember once, at that period of my life when I was slowly but systematically dismantling my Christian faith, falling asleep on my bed while listening to a Sting CD.

It just so happened – quite by chance, no doubt – that the song ‘Fragile’ was playing as I entered that strange region of consciousness halfway between waking and sleeping. And in that altered state of perception something peculiar and wonderful happened.

When the song entered the musical interlude, Sting’s classical guitar, which carries the solo, spoke to me. It didn’t speak to me in words. There could be no translation. But it spoke to me as clearly as words ever could about the fragility of life.

It told me – as far as words can express it – that life is brief, that it is over almost as soon as it is begun, that it fades away as swiftly and surely as the bloom of a rose, but that it is all the more beautiful for all of that.

The experience was remarkable in itself. But even more so because the insight it contained went so much against the grain of my conscious thinking at that time.

I had just, very reluctantly, begun to abandon my belief in everlasting life, and, with it, my belief in there being anything of lasting meaning in life.

I found this terribly depressing. If life had no lasting meaning, then what was the point of it? What was the point of
anything
? Of what use was it to experience beauty or pleasure or love, knowing that none of these things would endure?

I felt disappointed and angry with life, with the universe, with everything.

But somehow, the notes and phrases from Sting’s guitar solo opened my mind to a new idea: to the idea that life and beauty and pleasure and love are all the more precious precisely
because
they cannot last.

This was an idea that my conscious, analytical mind, in its hurt and bruised state, would have rejected angrily. But in that semi-conscious state, it sneaked in under the radar, lodged itself inside me, and made its presence felt.

The Japanese have a phrase,
mono no aware
, that captures this idea beautifully. Literally, it translates as ‘the pathos of things’, and it refers to the awareness of the impermanence of things – an awareness that, though sad, is tinged with beauty.

This state of awareness arises when you are confronted with something beautiful, and at the same time confronted with its transience. The feelings of joy and sadness that are evoked by this double consciousness merge together into a new and profound emotion.

The Japanese tradition of
hanami
, cherry blossom viewing, provides a perfect illustration of
mono no aware
.

There are lots of varieties of cherry tree in Japan, many of which bloom for just a few days, each spring. Every year, the Japanese hold
hanami
parties beneath the flowering trees to enjoy the beauty of the blossoms, and the intensity of the experience is heightened by the knowledge that this beauty is short-lived.

Intrinsically, there is perhaps no more beauty in cherry blossom than there is in apple or pear blossom. But the transience of cherry blossom evokes a feeling that goes beyond the ordinary appreciation of beauty. It evokes – or
can
evoke in a sensitive observer – the inexpressibly sad, sweet, and tender feeling of
mono no aware
.

At St Ives, we were just twenty-five miles – a single day’s walk, at a push – from Land’s End. Our plan, though, was to do the journey in two stages: first, fifteen miles from St Ives to the village of Pendeen, and then ten miles from Pendeen to Land’s End. But before that, we took an unprecedented two days’ rest in St Ives.

Not that two lean, mean walking-machines like Wendy and I needed that amount of rest. But we had previously arranged to meet a friend in Pendeen, and were running ahead of schedule. Plus, we were not at all averse to delaying, for a couple of days, our arrival at Land’s End.

St Ives was a splendid place to kick back and contemplate the end of JoGLE.

It’s a pretty little seaside resort with four beautiful sandy beaches. The older part of town, near to the shoreline, is a pleasing mishmash of narrow, uneven streets lined with old-fashioned houses and shops. And just as importantly, for cash-strapped, calorie-deprived, long-distance walkers, the newer part of town has a Wetherspoon’s.

We stayed at the Trelhoyan Manor Hotel, a nineteenth-century mansion set in lovely gardens overlooking St Ives Bay. This is run by the Christian Guild, a Christian holiday and hotel company that provides ‘Christian-based holidays for everyone who is a Christian, who is seeking to find Christ, or who is in sympathy with the Christian faith’. And, although neither Wendy nor I fulfil any of those criteria, we had a pleasant stay nonetheless.