‘.. ‘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
