…SOURCE…
Camino 2015 / Stage 68 / Friday 3 July / From Bercianos del Camino Real to Mansilla de las Mulas / 27 km
Straight on … Straight-ahead … The path today is an unceasing straight line. Plane trees have been planted along the path as a UNESCO patrimonial project and financed by the European Union in this arid and nearly final stretch of the Meseta. But they are still too small and visibly lack water to develop adequately. The springs must be drying up in this beginning of July, all the surroundings are burned by the sun, and I too am burning with fever. I must have drunk some contaminated water yesterday, for I felt ill during the night. It is with turbulent intestines and a piercing headache that I begin my stage this morning.
Why have I thrown myself into such an undertaking? I see myself so cheerful at the start of the path nearly 10 weeks ago. I was sure of having made a good decision in setting off for Compostela. Ah! They warned me that the pilgrimage would not always be easy! Today I recognize its difficulty: it is real birth pains to which I’m comparing my pains today. Will I manage to “deliver” this sixty-eighth stage?
At this moment, I cannot go any further; I stop in the shade of a scrawny bush, remove my shoes, and lie down. I use my backpack as a pillow and fall asleep.
My health disorders make me envy these pilgrims who pass by in much better shape than I, and who ask me if I have enough to drink. I don’t want anything and wish they would leave me in peace, for what I want most is to sleep. My thoughts are vaguely delirious. I go back in time, imagining my ancestors’ places of origin, always much greener and cooler in this summer season. I go back in time and space. While I’m sweating in the heat, I imagine the interplanetary cold, near the Kelvin absolute zero: I would really like to understand its secret.
I go back even further to the origins of the universe, its certainties and uncertainties. By mathematical extrapolation, in a theoretical way, it is believed that this universe was born 13.7 billion years ago. And it is supposed that at the moment of the “big bang” its dimensions were ridiculously small (10 million billion billion billion smaller than a hydrogen atom), and a temperature unbelievably high (100 million billion billion degrees). And here I am, me too, huddled in a fetal position, hands between my thighs, and head too full of temperature! To say that this Earth on which I lay moaning is part of a system of planets with the sun at the center, and they estimate it appeared 4.5 billion years ago! How could the age of the universe be only about 3 times older than the Earth?
Wouldn’t there have been another universe before the one we are studying today? A pre-universe? Why not several, in fact? Proto-universes? Each one would be born of a Big Bang, diffused then contracted again until another Big Bang, in a cycle of successive expansions and coalescences. One can conceive of such universes preceding ours, created from material much older than 13.7 billion years. They would not have proved viable, while ours, by an ultra-fine and inexplicable adjustment, has reached the ideal speed of expansion. This expansion permitted the hatching of life, and even of thinking beings, capable of researching the moment when their universe originated, but incapable of finding the least trace of the proto-universes which preceded it!
Thus, from chaos and disorder would have come order. From movement and discontinuity would have come continuity. From nothingness and void would have appeared matter. Out of cold and inert would have appeared heat and life. Among organic beings surging in abundance, mollusks, dinosaurs and lemurs has come the human being. His potential is inexplicable before his conception, his source keeps itself anonymous and refuses to explain his essence, but he is truly there, the human, a being able to think of non-being, and sad to imagine is own finality, so much can develop taste for life!
Is it to compensate for the sadness of my mortality that the weak human I am today dreams of this continuity between “nothing” and “something”? I search for the joy of a source which is not chaotic, but which on the contrary has organized all this disorder. Is it my “I” speaking, wanting for me the successful conclusion of something in expansion since the dawn of time, and seeking to liberate me from my passing fever? Or else, is it my ego torturing me and twisting me on myself, gluing me to the ground with the force of gravity that would have already condemned the proto-universes to collapse over themselves? Am I, with other pilgrims (whether they know it or not), drawn by the Alpha toward the Omega point? Am I at the edge of a mysterious Right Side beyond the perceptible Reverse Side of this world, of this nature where I groan?
Guy Trainar says very aptly that in the same way that the edge of a painting is not in the painting, how could what happens in nature originate in nature itself?
“Do you need water?” Here I am waking up and making out a couple of Dutch pilgrims carefully leaning over me. She has a straw hat and she smiles very kindly to me. And quite thoughtfully, he is soon handing over his canteen to me. Will this water be safer than the one I drank yesterday? Where did he get it filled? But I don’t ponder much: I forget about the Alpha and the Omega, I smile in return, and I delight in long sips! And amazingly so, thank you, it must be the result of their gesture of compassion, I suddenly feel like everything is back to normal …
