Chapter 7
Together with My Shadow
I began talking to it.
That is not entirely true.
I had said a few words to the shadow earlier in the journey. On the Meseta, the words became a conversation.
The shadow never answered.
Yet it became my most enduring conversation partner on the high plain.
The sun was behind me as I walked west, and the shadow fell ahead of me on the way. In the morning it was long. The hat made the head look broad, while the legs stretched unnaturally far across the gravel. The pack grew into a dark hump on its back. The shadow of the staff struck the ground before the staff itself did.
As the day went on, the figure drew closer. At midday it lay almost beneath my feet. Later it grew again and walked ahead of me towards the next village.
I could never catch it.
If I quickened my pace, it did the same.
If I stopped, it stopped.
It followed my slightest movement and yet was always some distance away.
◆
The conversation had begun long before the Meseta.
Already on the fourth day, on the old Roman road after Puente la Reina, I had noticed the figure ahead of me. The sun was scorching, my feet ached, and I was trying to drink often from the two water bottles in my pack.
The shadow looked comical.
It was broad at the bottom and strangely thin at the top. The hat and the pack made it scarcely human. I was irritated that it remained in my field of vision all the time. Then I began to laugh at it.
When no one else was nearby, I said something aloud.
I do not remember what.
Perhaps I commented on its appearance. Perhaps I asked it to move. It was not a serious conversation. I had been walking alone for several hours and heard only my own voice.
That was enough for something to begin.
A few days later, on the road between Los Arcos and Viana, the shadow was there again. The air shimmered with heat, and my tender feet felt every small stone. The villages were far apart, and there were few people to be seen.
I asked why I was there.
Not because I had forgotten the explanation. I had prepared for the journey for several months. I could explain that my doctoral work on shame and sexual abuse had left its mark, and that I needed distance before the dissertation defence. I had a destination, a plane ticket, and a plan.
But the explanation did not answer the question.
Why was I here, right now, on a hot gravel road in Spain, with sore feet and a shadow ahead of me?
I simply walked and walked.
Then I began to sing.
“One hundred bottles of beer on the wall.”
The song came from my childhood in the United States. I had used it at school when lessons dragged on, on the school bus, and at night when I was trying to fall asleep. Now I sang the bottles down, one by one, until the wall was empty.
It took half an hour.
The shadow walked ahead of me through the whole song.
When the last bottle was gone, childhood had come closer.
◆
The way asked questions without question marks.
Who are you?
Where do you come from?
What do you want?
Where are you going?
How will you go on?
I had formulated similar questions as a philosopher and teacher. In a classroom they could be examined, delimited, and placed within an academic context. On the way they were less orderly.
They followed my steps.
I could not set them down with the pack when I took a break. They lay in the body and waited while I ate. When I got up, they continued.
The shadow demanded no carefully considered answers.
It let me finish speaking, even when I contradicted myself.
I could say that I was on my way to Santiago. It still lay ahead of me, as though the place name were not answer enough.
I could say that I wanted to put the doctoral work behind me. It continued to follow.
I could say that I was seeking stillness.
It answered with silence.
And so the conversation remained open.
◆
By the time I reached the Meseta, I had been walking for almost two weeks. The shadow was no longer a chance figure on the road. I was becoming familiar with it.
We spoke less about childhood than during the first week. Now the conversation was more about how we were doing.
Hard going, I might say.
Not unbearable.
Just hard going.
Life had been complicated before I left. Work, responsibility, people, appointments, and questions without easy answers had followed one another. There were difficulties on the way too, but they had become concrete.
I was thirsty.
My foot was tender.
The pack was heavy.
It was a long way to the next village.
Such problems could not always be solved, but they could be met. I could drink, rest, adjust the pack, and walk more slowly.
The shadow had no pack, but its shape showed that I carried one.
It had no feet, but it stopped when I had to stop.
It knew no thirst, but it lay beside me when I sat down to drink.
It did nothing to help.
Yet it did not leave me.
◆
Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing.
I had chosen to walk alone. It gave me the freedom to find my own pace, stop when I wished, and let a stage become longer or shorter. I did not have to explain my decisions or negotiate the day’s destination with someone else.
But chosen solitude could open out and become loneliness.
On the high plain I could walk for several hours without meeting anyone. The landscape changed so slowly that it was as though I stood still while my legs continued. No one was waiting for me around the next bend. There was hardly even a bend.
Then the shadow became a confirmation that I was there.
The dark figure ahead of me was not another person. It could not see me, answer, or reach out a hand. Yet it showed that a body was moving through the landscape.
My body.
My life.
My presence on this way.
When a cloud passed in front of the sun, the shadow disappeared.
It happened without transition. One moment it walked ahead of me. The next it was gone.
I noticed that I missed it.
As soon as the sun emerged again, it returned. I caught myself greeting it.
There you are.
◆
The shadow showed me, but it did not look like me.
Its shape changed with the light and the ground. In the morning it could be taller than a house and at midday almost disappear beneath my shoes. The pack could look larger than the body. The staff could become a long, thin arm.
None of the figures was a portrait.
Yet all of them were mine.
For a long time I had been used to understanding myself through roles. Child welfare worker. Manager. Teacher. Researcher. Doctoral student. Husband, father, and friend. The roles were not false. They told something true about where I belonged and what responsibility I carried.
On the high plain, none of them was visible.
The shadow showed only a man with a hat, a staff, and a pack.
The people I met did not know what I had written, where I worked, or what others called me. They asked where I came from, how far I had walked, and how my feet were.
It was liberating.
It also made me uneasy.
When the roles disappear, a finished and true self does not necessarily remain. Instead, we encounter the question anew.
Who are you when no one knows who you usually are?
I put the question to the shadow.
It changed shape as the road climbed.
◆
After nineteen days I could feel from my beard that my face had changed.
I had not seen the change happen. Each day had simply added a little more beard and a little more sun to my skin. My belt had to be tightened. My legs were stronger. My hands had learned the pack by heart.
I was not quite the same as when I began.
I wrote that in my notes.
The sentence is simple, but I did not know what it meant. Was it only the body that had changed? Had the journey already done something to who I was? Or did I want so badly to be changed that I interpreted the beard and the looser trousers as signs of something larger?
The shadow offered no explanation.
It showed only the outline.
Perhaps that is what a shadow can do. It shows that something is there, but not what it is.
I had to live with the indistinctness.
◆
On the way towards Reliegos I walked for three hours almost straight ahead.
The tracks of other pilgrims were visible in the gravel, but I saw few people. The photographs I took resembled one another. Grain, road, and sky. The same shadow ahead of me.
Boredom did not come as sleepiness. It came as restlessness in my attention. I began looking for something that might happen.
A village.
A person.
A view.
A sign.
When nothing happened, my thoughts began to repeat themselves. They made their own noise in the stillness.
I could have continued like that for hours, irritated that the landscape was not entertaining me. Instead, I told the shadow that we needed to pull ourselves together.
It was not the surroundings that were monotonous.
It was the gaze.
I raised my head.
Later I met a farmer with a flock of sheep. He walked quickly in front, and the animals followed without a dog driving them. The sight made me think about leadership, obedience, and all the times people follow the one in front simply because he is in front.
I laughed.
The high plain had not changed.
I had looked up.
◆
It was easy to turn the shadow into a figure.
I could speak to it as though it were another person, put opinions into it, and let it ask questions I myself wanted to hear. But it was not a wise man, a hidden guide, or a better version of me.
It was the absence of light.
It arose because the body stood between the sun and the ground.
Even so, the conversation became real.
Not because the shadow answered, but because my words became audible. Thoughts can change shape silently and escape before we notice what they contain. When I spoke them on an empty road, I had to hear what I was actually saying.
Sometimes something sounded wise in my head and foolish in the air.
Then I laughed and walked on.
At other times I heard an unease I had wrapped in elegant formulations. The shadow let it remain there without offering comfort.
I could not impress it.
Nor could I disappoint it.
It knew no difference between the professor and the child who sang about a hundred bottles of beer to endure a long day.
Both cast the same shadow.
◆
From time to time I thought about Heidegger’s idea of human being-in-the-world.
For Heidegger, the human being does not first stand outside the world and observe it. We are always already in it, occupied with things, places, and other people, before we make existence itself into a question.
At the university, such a concept can open large questions about existence. On the high plain it was less solemn.
I was in the world.
My shoes stood in the dust.
The sun warmed my neck.
My mouth was dry.
The shadow fell ahead of me.
There was no distance between existence and what was happening. I was not observing life from the outside. I was the body walking through the heat.
When I became too preoccupied with the concept, I almost tripped over a stone.
The shadow jerked.
I laughed again.
The way had its own way of bringing philosophy back down to the ground.
◆
In the evening, the shadow disappeared before I did.
When the sun went down behind the houses, it dissolved into darkness. I found a bed, showered, washed clothes, and ate with people I might never meet again.
In the hostels I was not alone. The dormitories could hold fifty or a hundred people. There were voices, laughter, snoring, wet clothes, and packs along the walls. Around a table, people told one another where they came from and why they were walking.
Yet every pilgrim took their own day with them into bed.
No one had walked exactly my steps.
No one had heard the conversation with the shadow.
I could tell others about the villages, the heat, and the distance. It was harder to explain what the stillness had done to me. The words did not always fit around a kitchen table.
In the morning we went out one by one.
The sun rose.
The shadows returned.
◆
I had travelled to find stillness.
At first I thought it would be the absence of sound and thought. Then I discovered that stillness could be full of voices from a life already lived. Childhood, work, family, and people I had met walked with me.
The shadow did not silence those voices.
It gave them room.
It was not always pleasant. Some memories came without my having asked for them. Some questions I would rather have postponed until the next village. But the way had plenty of time.
It did not demand that everything be resolved.
Only that I not run from what came.
In this sense, the conversation with the shadow also belonged to obedience.
I did not have to believe everything I thought. I did not have to follow every memory to its end or find an answer to every question. But I had to acknowledge that the thoughts were there.
Obedience was remaining in my own life long enough to hear it.
◆
Sometimes I asked the shadow where we were going.
Santiago, I answered on its behalf.
But it never pointed towards the cathedral. It lay only in the direction determined by the light and the body.
If the way turned, it turned.
If I went the wrong way, it followed.
There was something unsettling about this. A faithful companion is not necessarily one who shows the right way. The shadow did not warn me when I missed a yellow arrow. It merely confirmed that I was continuing.
I had to raise my eyes myself.
Silence was not the same as truth.
An inner conversation did not relieve me of the need to look for signs in the world.
So I alternated between looking down at the shadow and up towards the way. Too much attention to the dark figure could also become a form of self-absorption. I had not come to Spain only to contemplate myself.
There were people along the way.
Some needed to be listened to.
Some offered food, help, or a place at the table.
Some walked beside me for a while and then disappeared again.
The shadow could teach me to be alone, but not to live without others.
◆
As I approached León, the roads became busier. The villages lay closer together, and the sounds of the city began to enter the stillness. The shadow was still ahead of me when the sun was behind me, but I did not notice it all the time.
That did not matter.
A conversation partner does not have to demand attention in order to be present.
I had not found the answer to who I was.
Nor did I quite know why I was still walking.
But the questions had lost some of their threat. I could carry them without answering them. They followed the rhythm of my steps and rested when I rested.
On the high plain I had experienced that a person can be alone without being abandoned. I had also experienced that one can be surrounded by people and still have to walk some stretches oneself.
The shadow walked with me, but it could not walk for me.
It could not carry the pack.
Nor could it carry what I had brought from home and had not yet put down.
In my pocket lay a small stone from the garden. The shadow did not show it, but I could feel its weight.
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