Patrick Leigh Fermor in Harper’s
In the November issue of Harper’s magazine, Robert Macfarlane has written an article titled ‘Voyagers: The restless genius of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin.’ Here’s the first two paragraph, referring to the trip that was the basis for Leigh Fermor’s famous travel books: A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water:
In 1933, aged eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor woke up in London with a hangover. Instead of going back to sleep, he decided to walk to Constantinople. His plan was to live as a wandering scholar, to sleep by the wayside and share cigarettes with hobos and pilgrims. But being who he was—a well-connected young man with high-wattage charm—he ended up strolling from castle to castle, playing hop-Schloss across Germany, Hungary, and Transylvania, sipping fine wine from crystal goblets and smoking yard-long pipes with archdukes and earls. Leigh Fermor was an aristocratic supertramp, and for a year he dawdled through the doomed world of Mitteleuropa, snatching scenes from a snow globe shortly before it was shattered by war.
I was eighteen when I read A Time of Gifts (1977), the opening volume of Leigh Fermor’s legendary account of that legendary walk, and it was a book that I first felt in my feet. It made me, as it’s made so many people, want to stride out in search of adventure. The spell it casts comes partly from the air of miracle that attends Leigh Fermor’s journey. He walks with the seven-league boots of youth, fatigue barely registering as whole countries roll beneath his heels. The comforting rhythms of his days—exertion, encounter, rest, food, sleep, da capo—rock the read into a trance. Even Leigh Fermor’s ‘small rucksack,’ described in Between the Woods and the Water (1986) [a rucksack that once belonged to Byron] has near magical properties.
