Places

Anglo-French author and Catholic social critic Hilaire Belloc was a widely traveled man: an amateur mariner, a mountaineer, and a long-distance hiker, he had the opportunity to see much of Europe (and even some of America) on foot, which gave him a familiarity with terrain, climate, places, local populations, and customs that few writers have had to the same degree. It is even said that Belloc insisted on walking around any battlefield before he ever wrote about a historic battle that took place there.The present volume, a collection of various magazine articles, was published during the height of the Second World War; one sees Belloc in mourning for the passing of the old Europe. He writes in the introduction: 'I have here collected many an impression of travel of the sort which I fear can never be repeated in a ruined world.' He expresses the wish that his English countrymen 'knew more about other people.' Seeing countries fractured, he recalls that religion used to be the 'great bond,' but 'of that bond people to-day know nothing.' For Belloc, 'a secondary and much feebler bond is travel.' Yet he does not believe 'in the effect of travel as an aid to wisdom unless it be accompanied by a profoundly transcendental and a universal philosophy.' While Belloc may have been lamenting his fellow citizens, he certainly described himself accurately: all of Belloc’s musings are suffused with a sense of the Europe of old, of the ages of faith which formed it, and the poetry, mysticism, and philosophy to which it has been home since the dawn of history.Places offers another glimpse, through the window of Belloc’s great literary mind, of that luminous and numinous land of which the world, ever falling into ruins and ever rebuilding, is but a distant echo.