Christ Stopped at Eboli

Are you one of those people who routinely puts a book in your bag before leaving home? Okay, so we are in the minority, a few more may leave one in the car, or pack one only when they know they will be away from home for more than a night or so. When I say book I recognise that today this may include electronic forms, but this post is about how a single book may become a companion and be read over and over again. And whilst I am not a religious person, and pass no judgement on other’s holy texts, the kinds of book I refer to here certainly do aid contemplation, offer much to meditate upon and are a source of wisdom and spiritual guidance.

‘.. ‘We’re not Christians,’ they say. ‘Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli.’ ‘Christian’, in their way of speaking, means ‘human being’…’ (Levi 1982:11)   

Those of us non-electronic readers, who are lucky enough to be able to scan our bookshelves in the last moments before leaving home and select what we will read today, face a bigger dilemma when we know we will be away for any length of time. You may feel you only have the space for one book, or are only prepared to tolerate the weight of one, but some of us go a stage further and ask; what one book will satisfy all our needs on this journey, or indeed any journey which may be of indeterminate length? Sometimes we end up giving the status of companion to a single volume for years at a time.

I first became aware of this as a child when I read John Buchan’s Richard Hannay spy stories, where one of the central characters uses John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as a guide and companion. Only reading Buchan later in life did I realise how much Bunyan had influenced all his stories, leading later still to an appreciation of how Bunyan’s personal story had come to have such a powerful impact, over more than four centuries, on thousands of people pursuing less than conventional religious lives.

It was around the beginning of the 1980’s, when I was in my early twenties, that I found myself placing a copy of Kipling’s Kim in my rucksack whenever I went on a trip. I had begun to realise, as with Buchan, that what others had told you was childhood reading did in fact contained more, much more, if you were willing to learn a little about the historical context in which they had been written.

Kipling was only displaced when a university lecturer pressed his copy of Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli into my hands at the start of the Easter vacation in 1984. (I should say that even at that time he was the last remaining philosopher at the university!) What prompted him was one of those conversations that would gather you an audience in the area of the humanities building, between the office and the coffee machine, where undergraduates congregated between lectures. I’d been trying to explain that I was about to return to the community in south west France where I had spent four months or so the previous year. I have described elsewhere this small outpost of the counterculture of the early 1970’s, an organic farm and vineyard in the Bordeaux region. But it was my assertion that in many ways this modern community embodied virtuous aspects of traditional European peasant life that led to the lecturer offering me the book as a corrective influence on what he suspected was my over stated, if not romantic view. But of course what he could not have anticipated was that I would still be reading it thirty years later - for with my experience of WWOOFing, I never came to think of Christ Stopped at Eboli as a negative interpretation of the peasant experience at all!

‘Many years have gone by, years of war and of what men call History. Buffeted here and there at random I have not been able to return…’ (Levi 1982:11)

After giving back the loaned copy, I bought one of my own. But in time it fell apart, hence the photo above. One of those rare experiences where the cover illustration seems to match the images evoked when reading the text. Still today a copy goes in my rucksack when I’m out walking, or can be found in my satchel when I’m sitting in a café, as of now, trying to devise an ecotherapy that takes better account of the historical reality of agricultural labour and the limitations of our manmade landscape.

So what’s the book about? Carlo Levi was a young doctor and vocal left-wing opponent of Mussolini in Italy in the 1930’s, he was ‘banished’ for a year to one of the most remote and ‘backward’ parts of the country - a mountain village beyond Eboli.

Levi, C (1982) Christ Stopped at Eboli Penguin: London