In Woolf's footsteps
In the spring, the poet Geoffrey Chaucer famously wrote, humans long to travel. Once the flowers bloom and the birds take up their song again—and, we might add, once we have shucked off our heavy coats and put away the snow shovel—“than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.”
During spring break I made a pilgrimage. With my husband and my daughter, I traced the path novelist Virginia Woolf took through Italy in 1908, when she was still Virginia Stephen. I followed in her footsteps as best I could, searching for the sights she described in her diary, standing before works of art she analyzed and puzzled over.
It is almost the definition of pilgrimage that we follow in the footsteps of others. The Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, the route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain—these paths have been traveled by countless pilgrims, been prayed over and wept over. When we step onto those pilgrimage roads we join all those who have traveled them. We join our prayers to their prayers and, in a very real sense, we join our lives to theirs.
