A Moveable Feast Read Free

shines in others and in ourselves.’
    ‘You free for some washing-up, Pico?’ the man next to me, in an apron, says. Seconds later, I am standing next to the former prior, in his eighties, and the current one, working briskly, as we chat, to make all the plates shine again.

    What in the world am I doing here, you might ask? I sometimes ask myself. I’m not a Catholic, and nine years of enforced chapel twice a day at British boarding school (with Latin hymns on Sunday nights) seemed to satisfy more than a lifetime’s quota of religion. I respect those people who have the groundedness and selflessness that faith often brings – the alertness to compassion and a larger view of things – but I’m not quick to call those virtues mine.
    Yet what I am is a traveller, whose life is about trying to occupy shoes – and lives and hearts – very different from my own; and a human being, who cannot fail to be washed clean and opened up by silence. So I come to this Benedictine hermitage, tucked into the central coast of California, and sit in a little cell looking out on the great blue plate of the Pacific, 1300 feet below, scintillant in the sunshine, blue-green waters pooling around rocks, filling the horizon from one end of my deck to the other, and think about what travel really means, and why these men in hoods seem like the most fearless and spirited adventurers I’ve ever met.
    A monk wants to be clear and undistracted in his journey, so he doesn’t have too much to eat (in theory), or too little; there’s nothing uncomfortable about this place, and sometimes I feel almost embarrassed at how well treated we visitors are. In my little trailer – ‘Hesychia’, it’s called, meaning ‘spirit of stillness’ – there’s a large pot of Extra-Crunchy Skippy peanut butter (‘Fuel the Fun!’) above the stove, next to a bag of Swiss Miss Milk Chocolate. In the communal kitchen, the ten or twelve people staying here on retreat can help themselves to ‘Very Cherry’ yoghurt and extra-virgin olive oil, Colombian coffee and kosher salt. Someone has contributed pineapple salsa from Trader Joe’s to the communal refrigerator, and one large bottle is always filled with oatmeal raisin cookies.
    Every day, at 12.30, bells ring – as they do for Mass – and a monk drives down in a cracked blue hatchback, no licence plate on it, dust swirling up behind him as he accelerates out of theMonastic Enclosure, and brings us a tureen of hot soup, a main dish, some vegetables and often extras, from which each of us collects a lunch to eat in silence in our rooms. One day it is carrot soup, flecks of Bugs Bunny’s favourite floating on the surface so it looks like strawberry yoghurt. Another day there are egg rolls, and pasta shells with salmon in them (fish the only ingredient to disrupt the monks’ vegetarianism). One year every dish came with a sprig of mint, or some basil, courtesy of a chef from a four-star restaurant in San Francisco who was spending a year here on retreat, getting himself in order.
‘Buon appetito!’
the monk always says as he leaves the glass trays on the counter, to come and collect them again an hour later.

    If I wanted mere food, I realised some years ago – steaks and sorbets and spicy panang curry with strong chillies – I could find them almost anywhere these days, ten minutes from my home or across the world in some fairy-tale palace; if I wanted a meal to remember, I could go back to Aleppo or Buenos Aires or Hanoi. But after seventeen years of criss-crossing the globe, I came to think that it was only the food I couldn’t see that really sustained me and only inner nutrition that made me happy, deep down. A meal I grabbed in a Paris McDonald’s, to keep me walking through the streets of the 6th
arrondissement
, left me hungry ten minutes after I’d finished it; a richer, fancier lunch left me so replete that all energy for exploration was gone for the day.
    Here I just get into a car and