…PROGRAMMED…
Stage 11 / Thursday 7 May / From Saint-Front to Le Puy-en-Velay / 26 km
The lake I walked along yesterday was perfectly circular and gorgeous to see before I discovered Saint-Front has only one drawback: its humidity favors the hatching of mosquito eggs. And wasn’t there just one of these insects who ruined the atmosphere of the hostel where I was happily anticipating a night alone! Barely was my light extinguished when this little being bestirred itself to dance a strident sarabande. As soon as I turned the light on, he melted silently into the decor. One would think he was programmed to give me insomnia. And this morning I realized that this brazen insect had bitten my forehead! Stretching it further for a play on words, I tell myself, “it was written in my destiny that I should suffer an affront in Saint-Front!”
It was written … Can I really conceive that of all the generations of mosquitoes that have developed since Noah had the mad idea to shelter a pair on his ark, it was written that one of them would be programmed to harass me specifically that spring night of the third millennium AD? Who decided that its erratic flight would come to trouble the sleep of this particular pilgrim who had come from elsewhere with no intention to try and pick a quarrel with anyone?
Pure chance, or implacable programming? Speaking of the probability of the evolution of life beginning from inanimate matter, Sir Fred Hoyle, famous British mathematician and astronomer, declared: “The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein” (Hoyle – Hoyle on evolution in Nature, vol. 294, 12 November 1981, p. 105).
Between chance and program, can I let pass the idea of an intelligent impulsion of energy which knows how to take its time, the duration doing the rest? Was the appearance of the human species brought about by blind evolution of the living, or was it drawn by a precise vision of the whole, a sort of melting pot which refines all that is unhealthy, illogical, absurd until there appears a creature better conforming to the original drawing / design ? The second hypothesis is the one that the genius Michelangelo adopted while sweating over the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel… A divine spark passing from the creator to his creature …
Would an organizing impulsion have thus taken charge of my individual destiny? Does it form my character by a flux of information which it sorts the most favorably while leaving me the choice to adopt the most pertinent, by thought, intuition, and/or emotion? If so, for what reason? To return to an original unit knowingly dispersed? Integration of a more effective wheel in a clock which will eventually measure eternity? Fine-tuning of a design, still in it first draft, of a creature already intended to become exceptional?
Now there’s a stupefying thought: my freedom to invent every sort of possible scenario to justify my existence! The thinking reed… (Blaise Pascal – Les Pensées, Brunschvicg edition, fragment 347). And at the same time my feeling that I have very, very little means to change what appears to me to be unavoidable, and moreover already written! The reed bending under the wind … But if the wind is strong, the reed better be feeble. Yes, it would be better that the reed become slimmer and slimmer over generations, thus resisting better and better to the inescapable airstream! I am perfectly, yes “perfectly”—that is an incredible word—“free” to enter the refining scheme or not, taking advantage of what my memory retains and what experience teaches me. Free also to want to become an oak tree, at the risk of uprooting!
Oh joy, I arrive at the top of the hill of Montjoie from which the pilgrims coming from the East happily experience the bird’s eye view of the city of Le Puy! Signs with the symbol of the St-Jacques shell indicate which direction will lead me there. All things considered, in this decidedly revealing pilgrimage, I believe I feel more “guided” than “instrumental,” and more “instrumented” than “programmed”! Onwards!
