Carcassonne
"Carcassonne"by Gustave Nadaud (1880?)
Translated by: by John Reuben Thompson (abridged)
'I'm growing old, I've sixty years;
I've labored all my life in vain:
In all that time of hopes and fears
I've failed my dearest wish to gain.
I see full well that here below
Bliss unalloyed there is for none.
My prayer will ne'er fulfilment know
I never have seen Carcassonne,
I never have seen Carcassonne!
You see the city from the hill,
It lies beyond the mountains blue,
And yet to reach it one must still
Five long and weary leagues pursue,
And to return as many more!
Ah! had the vintage plenteous grown!
The grape withheld its yellow store!
I shall not look on Carcassonne,
I shall not look on Carcassonne!...
'The vicar's right; he says that we
Are ever wayward, weak and blind,
He tells us in his homily
Ambition ruins all mankind;
Yet could I there two days have spent
While still the autumn sweetly shone,
Ah me! I might have died content
When I had looked on Carcassonne,
When I had looked on Carcassonne!....
So crooned one day, close by Limoux,
A peasant double-bent with age;
'Rise up, my friend,' said I; 'with you
I'll go upon this pilgrimage.'
We left next morning his abode,
But (Heaven forgive him) halfway on,
The old man died upon the road;
He never gazed on Carcassonne,
Each mortal has his Carcassonne!
I've labored all my life in vain:
In all that time of hopes and fears
I've failed my dearest wish to gain.
I see full well that here below
Bliss unalloyed there is for none.
My prayer will ne'er fulfilment know
I never have seen Carcassonne,
I never have seen Carcassonne!
You see the city from the hill,
It lies beyond the mountains blue,
And yet to reach it one must still
Five long and weary leagues pursue,
And to return as many more!
Ah! had the vintage plenteous grown!
The grape withheld its yellow store!
I shall not look on Carcassonne,
I shall not look on Carcassonne!...
'The vicar's right; he says that we
Are ever wayward, weak and blind,
He tells us in his homily
Ambition ruins all mankind;
Yet could I there two days have spent
While still the autumn sweetly shone,
Ah me! I might have died content
When I had looked on Carcassonne,
When I had looked on Carcassonne!....
So crooned one day, close by Limoux,
A peasant double-bent with age;
'Rise up, my friend,' said I; 'with you
I'll go upon this pilgrimage.'
We left next morning his abode,
But (Heaven forgive him) halfway on,
The old man died upon the road;
He never gazed on Carcassonne,
Each mortal has his Carcassonne!
Each mortal has his Carcassonne! This line resonated in me so strongly on literal and metaphorical levels that I knew I had to explore it further. What created this burning desire in me to experience places that have stood since Ancient Times. Why do I feel that there is something I have yet to discover that holds immense importance for my life? What is the hold that certain times and places have on me? What is MY Carcassonne? I can not even explain myself in any way that makes complete sense. I only know that I have been drawn to them since I was very young by forces I do not fully understand to this day and may only postulate on their origin. For me, the past is personal.
I remember the first time I read the poem 'Ozymandias' by Percy Bysse Shelley
I was twelve when the movie Anne of the Thousand Days starring Richard Burton and Genevieve Bujold came out. This mind blowing introduction to Tudor History was followed shortly after by an entire year of British History in Grade 9. Mr. TJ Hole, a tall, black bearded Welshman, with whom I am still in contact through the wonders of social media, brought the Celts, the Jutes, the Picts, the Danes, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans, the Plantagnets, the Wars of the Roses, the Tudors and Elizabethans, the Stuarts and Cromwell all vividly to life as if I knew them personally. I could see the woad coated Celts fighting the Romans behind their Queen, Boudicca, defiant even in defeat,
watch Alfred the Great as he pondered by the fire, hear the screams of the disastrous King Edward II as he was murdered in Berkeley Castle by having red hot pokers inserted into his bowels, see the Saintly King Edward the Confessor whose bones still rest in Westminster Abbey, Harold Godwinson falling to William the Conquerer in the field near Hastings where you can still, today, stand in the very spot that Harold fell (and I later broke my elbow)! And, of course, Henry VIII, larger than life (pun intended) and his infamous love life had captured me from the opening credits of Anne...These stories from the past were fuel to surge onward in my quest to know more. As a teenager I devoured the Thomas B. Costaine series on The Plantagenets, read and reread the books by Anya Seton, Taylor Caldwell and Frank Yerby (writers of what I call Historical Faction) watched every history and biblical based movie (some were less more than accurate) that came out, took specialized courses in University on Mediaeval, Renaissance and Reformation time periods of, not just England, but now, Italy, Germany, Holland and France. The more I read and watched, the more I learned, the more questions I had, and my soul burned to see these places for myself. When I was eighteen, I got my first chance.
In my second year (1975) of my Bachelor of Arts (major in History...duh) degree at Mt St Vincent University in Halifax, NS ( better known as Pill Hill), the English Department (my second major as it turned out) offered a ten day theater trip to London and surrounding areas for the princely sum of $500. The fact that there were nuns going is probably the ONLY reason my mother allowed me to go, but I was off. Only two other students went that I remember, the rest were faculty. I remember very little of the people I went with, but I recall the minute I was fed up with them. We were in Westminster Abbey, one of the most intense places I have ever been. Half an hour later they wanted to leave to go shopping. I was on my hands and knees tracing out figures and letters on 14thC. grave slab as if by touching it, I could be transported back. I told them to go; I was staying. I was eighteen years old; I had my nineteenth birthday there. I am sixty-two now, but some parts of that trip are just as vivid as if they happened yesterday: standing in the middle of Stonehenge, touching the trilithons, something forbidden today, hardly anyone there; walking into the Tower of London, seeing the scaffold site and the grave of Anne Boleyn in the Chapel; touching the window in Shakespeare's birth room where Charles Dickens had etched his name; standing over the Greenwich Meridian with one foot in the East and one foot in the West, the beautiful hues of Cotswold stone. I was in love. I still am.
As part of my History major, I also studied Ancient Civilizations becoming enamored of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome. I was also privileged to be taught by a Holocaust survivor, Dr. Jan Fried, a Czechoslovakian Jew who had been interred at Birkenau. He was the teacher who ignited my fascination with the history of WWI and WWII; this would go on to play a huge role in my later life as well as expose my mother as an ignorant, racist bigot, but that is another tale. As part of my English major, I specialized in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age as well as the Romantic Poets. I even ended up with a Minor in Theology so I could better understand the role religions had played in shaping the events of the past ( a huge and ugly one). Everything kept drawing me back to England, but my next encounter with the fair isle would be postponed for many years. To quote Robbie Burns, "The best laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft a-gley."
Fast forward thirty-one years. Though my life did not follow the path that I had so obviously laid out for it (teaching for 35 years and then a happy retirement with a full pension), looking back now, I can see that the twists and turns during those years were there for a reason. I learned that, even when it seemed hopeless that I would ever realize my dreams of travel, fate would eventually come through for me. And I did believe, for many years, as I sat in dead end call center jobs, that my future was indeed bleak, hopelessly so, but, I never gave up reading, learning, watching everything and anything that I could to keep my mind active and inquiring. Then....2004....I found out that getting laid off can be a good thing! I could now afford to substitute teach; 2005 I got my first FULL PAYING term position; 2006 - my second term position and a third followed in 2007! I was alive with possibilities again when, in September of 2007, I was once again a permanent History (Ancient, European, African Canadian and Canadian) / English / Law / Geography / Random Trivia teacher at Prince Andrew High School in Dartmouth Nova Scotia. My world had turned completely around. But there was another reason my world had turned around. In February of 2006, I met Darren, and in August 2006, my dreams began coming true - we went to Italy. Even as I write this, almost thirteen years later, my heart is thudding in my chest as if it were only yesterday...Italia....the site of Caesar's assassination, a night walk through the Piazza Navonna, the Colosseum, Palatine Hill (42C in the shade) the Vatican Necropolis, Museum, St. Peter's, The Forum Romana...to walk on the very stones that the Emperors and soothsayers trod...the oldness of it all....magical...my dreams were being surpassed by reality.
Walking into Pompeii was a surreal experience for me; in my darkest days I used to say. "Let me see Pompeii and I will die happy!" I stood there, tears streaming down my face, thinking, "Not now!!" I figuratively and literally lost myself that day in Pompeii. We wandered, never knowing what lay around the next corner, perhaps a bar, a brothel, the remains of a tortured victim of Vesuvius. After eight hours, our weary legs could take no more, my mind was overwhelmed as we boarded the train for Naples. I could feel a stirring in the very core of me, a need was being fed, but it was far from sated. Twelve short days took us to Greek ruins in Paestum, the Renaissance wonders of Firenze ( to this day, the place I feel the most at home) where I followed in the footsteps of Michelangelo, Dante, DaVici, the Medicis and explored the vineyards of Tuscany. Returning to Canada held no joy for me.
2008 saw us in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, a sixteen day whirlwind Rick Steves tour that, while being an amazing trip (and our honeymoon), taught us that we are not really bus tour people. The highlight of that trip was our one day in the Swiss Alps which, miraculously, were snow covered in July..only for that one day!
There were no real heart pumping moments for me beyond seeing the Alps. No reaction like with England or Italy.
The bar was raised in 2009 when I received full funding to attend the International Summer Institute of Holocaust Educators at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for one month. Now imagine this - you take someone with a passion for Ancient History and archaeology, a minor in World Religions, a WWII and Holocaust teacher and drop her in the middle of Israel for one month....what possible impact could that have on her? Mind Blown! I experienced far too much to go into here; suffice it to say that I had a hard time describing that month when I got back. That trip led to a ten day tour of death camps in Poland and a return to Israel in 2014 during one of the wars with Gaza. All of it reached into my very gut and changed who I am forever. The person writing this piece now is not the same one who, on the first morning in Jerusalem, was up at daybreak to explore every nook and cranny of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher by herself. During those first moments in the Old City, I almost forgot to breathe. Time, heat, food...nothing had any meaning for me beyond the vibrating hum of energy that surrounded in me in all these places. The energy that clings to ancient sites. It was what I felt in England and Italy. I would feel it again. I think, too, that being unaware that I was susceptible to this energy made its impact all that more intense. I began to research this phenomenon.
In 2014 I also took my first group of forty-two high school students on a school trip to Italy. In 2012, I taught a very special group of students. They turned out to be the last ones to ever take Ancient History in Grade 10. The Powers The Be decided Grade 10s needed more Math and that History served no real purpose. You can imagine my reaction, but it was to no avail. These kids took many courses from me over their three years at Prince Andrew, and they were the ones that I took to Italy.
Watching those kids see the stories I had told them about Rome, Caesar, the Renaissance, Pompeii, Michaelangelo and so much more, come to life right before their eyes put a whole new spin on teaching and traveling for me. I saw kids cry in the Sistine Chapel; I saw kids quietly touching the walls of the ruins in Pompeii, wondering in the beauty of the country, its culture and history. A bond was created between many of them and myself over that time that has never been broken although they are now well on their way as young adults. Which will eventually bring me back to Carcassonne. Just a few more diversions...
In the meantime, I went to England and France in 2013 with a good friend. England immediately took hold of me again and shook me like a wet dog. The one specific place that especially captured me was Hampton Court. Why? The same captivation that started when I was in Grade 3 was still there. I wandered its halls in a daze, wanting to open every door that said. "No Entry" and walk through like I owned the place. I caressed the original linen fold panelling that still lined the walls in the oldest section of the "house that Wolsey built". Who had looked out that window into the courtyard below? What secrets were contained in its fabric?
How I wanted those walls to speak to me; the hair on the back of my neck was standing up. I gasped as I walked up the worn rock steps that lead into the Great Hall; in whose footsteps was I following? The Great Hall was lined with the same original tapestries that Henry VIII had made especially to grace it; now their colors were faded and dim, but here and there were glimpses of silver thread and cloth of gold. I stood eye to eye with the famous portrait of Anne Boleyn.... By the time we got on the boat to take us back to London via the Thames, I was exhausted and befuddled.
I had similar feelings at Windsor, the British Museum, the Great Hall of Westminster, Westminster Abbey and the Tower. Why so powerful in these places? Why this lifelong obsession? I don't know...I can only hypothesize. Although I loved France and can't wait to go back, I was not gripped by any place there. I felt great sadness on the D Day beaches and awe at Versailles, but not nearly the same level of emotion that I felt in England. To this very minute my heart yearns to return there...for a long time. The only other places I have felt this pull have been in Israel, Florence, Italy and in Greece - at Mycenae, Olympia, Patmos and Santorini. I remember getting back on the bus at Mycenae, a strange buzzing in my head. I was very quiet. Photis, our amazing tour director looked at me quizzically; I decided to take a chance. I simply asked, "Do you feel it? The energy that clings to the ancient places?" His eyes grew wide as he slowly nodded, "So you feel it, too?" I nodded; we had many very interesting conversations after that: some were silent. Did everyone experience this? Ummm...no.....in the words of one of my colleagues after our visit to Mycenae, " It was just a pit!" Obviously, she did not feel it! Lol!
Carcassonne! It is a place, and it is a metaphor. In 2020, a few of my former students, a dear life long friend and I are planning a month in France. Carcassonne is on the itinerary. I will see and experience the place which will be a breathtaking experience. Metaphorically though, what is my Carcassonne? What will quench the yearning in my soul for these certain places that, even after seeing them several times, I am still being pulled back to? Is the reason I keep searching because I am trying to find my past? Am I what I have always believed...an Ancient Soul? Perhaps what I am seeking can not be found; a unobtainable understanding? Again, the longer I live, the more questions I have..........Each mortal has his Carcassonne!
I remember the first time I read the poem 'Ozymandias' by Percy Bysse Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
I was in Grade 8 when this short poem captured my imagination and senses. I began to study the history of the ancient civilizations, something I do to this day, but my fascination with far off times and far away places began much earlier than that, somewhere around the age of eight when my Grade 3 music teacher, Miss Kennedy, used to bribe me to do my Math homework by letting me read books about Ireland, her home country, and England. I was hooked, first by the fact that horses played a huge role in the culture of both these places and then by the legends and stories from the Celtic past. I am part Irish, so leprechauns and kelpies were no strangers to me, but now I was discovering that there was a real place where these magical creatures dwelled. I needed to know more.
I was twelve when the movie Anne of the Thousand Days starring Richard Burton and Genevieve Bujold came out. This mind blowing introduction to Tudor History was followed shortly after by an entire year of British History in Grade 9. Mr. TJ Hole, a tall, black bearded Welshman, with whom I am still in contact through the wonders of social media, brought the Celts, the Jutes, the Picts, the Danes, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans, the Plantagnets, the Wars of the Roses, the Tudors and Elizabethans, the Stuarts and Cromwell all vividly to life as if I knew them personally. I could see the woad coated Celts fighting the Romans behind their Queen, Boudicca, defiant even in defeat,
watch Alfred the Great as he pondered by the fire, hear the screams of the disastrous King Edward II as he was murdered in Berkeley Castle by having red hot pokers inserted into his bowels, see the Saintly King Edward the Confessor whose bones still rest in Westminster Abbey, Harold Godwinson falling to William the Conquerer in the field near Hastings where you can still, today, stand in the very spot that Harold fell (and I later broke my elbow)! And, of course, Henry VIII, larger than life (pun intended) and his infamous love life had captured me from the opening credits of Anne...These stories from the past were fuel to surge onward in my quest to know more. As a teenager I devoured the Thomas B. Costaine series on The Plantagenets, read and reread the books by Anya Seton, Taylor Caldwell and Frank Yerby (writers of what I call Historical Faction) watched every history and biblical based movie (some were less more than accurate) that came out, took specialized courses in University on Mediaeval, Renaissance and Reformation time periods of, not just England, but now, Italy, Germany, Holland and France. The more I read and watched, the more I learned, the more questions I had, and my soul burned to see these places for myself. When I was eighteen, I got my first chance.
In my second year (1975) of my Bachelor of Arts (major in History...duh) degree at Mt St Vincent University in Halifax, NS ( better known as Pill Hill), the English Department (my second major as it turned out) offered a ten day theater trip to London and surrounding areas for the princely sum of $500. The fact that there were nuns going is probably the ONLY reason my mother allowed me to go, but I was off. Only two other students went that I remember, the rest were faculty. I remember very little of the people I went with, but I recall the minute I was fed up with them. We were in Westminster Abbey, one of the most intense places I have ever been. Half an hour later they wanted to leave to go shopping. I was on my hands and knees tracing out figures and letters on 14thC. grave slab as if by touching it, I could be transported back. I told them to go; I was staying. I was eighteen years old; I had my nineteenth birthday there. I am sixty-two now, but some parts of that trip are just as vivid as if they happened yesterday: standing in the middle of Stonehenge, touching the trilithons, something forbidden today, hardly anyone there; walking into the Tower of London, seeing the scaffold site and the grave of Anne Boleyn in the Chapel; touching the window in Shakespeare's birth room where Charles Dickens had etched his name; standing over the Greenwich Meridian with one foot in the East and one foot in the West, the beautiful hues of Cotswold stone. I was in love. I still am.
As part of my History major, I also studied Ancient Civilizations becoming enamored of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome. I was also privileged to be taught by a Holocaust survivor, Dr. Jan Fried, a Czechoslovakian Jew who had been interred at Birkenau. He was the teacher who ignited my fascination with the history of WWI and WWII; this would go on to play a huge role in my later life as well as expose my mother as an ignorant, racist bigot, but that is another tale. As part of my English major, I specialized in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age as well as the Romantic Poets. I even ended up with a Minor in Theology so I could better understand the role religions had played in shaping the events of the past ( a huge and ugly one). Everything kept drawing me back to England, but my next encounter with the fair isle would be postponed for many years. To quote Robbie Burns, "The best laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft a-gley."
Fast forward thirty-one years. Though my life did not follow the path that I had so obviously laid out for it (teaching for 35 years and then a happy retirement with a full pension), looking back now, I can see that the twists and turns during those years were there for a reason. I learned that, even when it seemed hopeless that I would ever realize my dreams of travel, fate would eventually come through for me. And I did believe, for many years, as I sat in dead end call center jobs, that my future was indeed bleak, hopelessly so, but, I never gave up reading, learning, watching everything and anything that I could to keep my mind active and inquiring. Then....2004....I found out that getting laid off can be a good thing! I could now afford to substitute teach; 2005 I got my first FULL PAYING term position; 2006 - my second term position and a third followed in 2007! I was alive with possibilities again when, in September of 2007, I was once again a permanent History (Ancient, European, African Canadian and Canadian) / English / Law / Geography / Random Trivia teacher at Prince Andrew High School in Dartmouth Nova Scotia. My world had turned completely around. But there was another reason my world had turned around. In February of 2006, I met Darren, and in August 2006, my dreams began coming true - we went to Italy. Even as I write this, almost thirteen years later, my heart is thudding in my chest as if it were only yesterday...Italia....the site of Caesar's assassination, a night walk through the Piazza Navonna, the Colosseum, Palatine Hill (42C in the shade) the Vatican Necropolis, Museum, St. Peter's, The Forum Romana...to walk on the very stones that the Emperors and soothsayers trod...the oldness of it all....magical...my dreams were being surpassed by reality.
 |
| At the Colosseum |
 |
| Pompeii at last! |
2008 saw us in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, a sixteen day whirlwind Rick Steves tour that, while being an amazing trip (and our honeymoon), taught us that we are not really bus tour people. The highlight of that trip was our one day in the Swiss Alps which, miraculously, were snow covered in July..only for that one day!
The bar was raised in 2009 when I received full funding to attend the International Summer Institute of Holocaust Educators at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for one month. Now imagine this - you take someone with a passion for Ancient History and archaeology, a minor in World Religions, a WWII and Holocaust teacher and drop her in the middle of Israel for one month....what possible impact could that have on her? Mind Blown! I experienced far too much to go into here; suffice it to say that I had a hard time describing that month when I got back. That trip led to a ten day tour of death camps in Poland and a return to Israel in 2014 during one of the wars with Gaza. All of it reached into my very gut and changed who I am forever. The person writing this piece now is not the same one who, on the first morning in Jerusalem, was up at daybreak to explore every nook and cranny of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher by herself. During those first moments in the Old City, I almost forgot to breathe. Time, heat, food...nothing had any meaning for me beyond the vibrating hum of energy that surrounded in me in all these places. The energy that clings to ancient sites. It was what I felt in England and Italy. I would feel it again. I think, too, that being unaware that I was susceptible to this energy made its impact all that more intense. I began to research this phenomenon.
 |
| Masada |
 |
| Meggido |
Watching those kids see the stories I had told them about Rome, Caesar, the Renaissance, Pompeii, Michaelangelo and so much more, come to life right before their eyes put a whole new spin on teaching and traveling for me. I saw kids cry in the Sistine Chapel; I saw kids quietly touching the walls of the ruins in Pompeii, wondering in the beauty of the country, its culture and history. A bond was created between many of them and myself over that time that has never been broken although they are now well on their way as young adults. Which will eventually bring me back to Carcassonne. Just a few more diversions...
In the meantime, I went to England and France in 2013 with a good friend. England immediately took hold of me again and shook me like a wet dog. The one specific place that especially captured me was Hampton Court. Why? The same captivation that started when I was in Grade 3 was still there. I wandered its halls in a daze, wanting to open every door that said. "No Entry" and walk through like I owned the place. I caressed the original linen fold panelling that still lined the walls in the oldest section of the "house that Wolsey built". Who had looked out that window into the courtyard below? What secrets were contained in its fabric?
Carcassonne! It is a place, and it is a metaphor. In 2020, a few of my former students, a dear life long friend and I are planning a month in France. Carcassonne is on the itinerary. I will see and experience the place which will be a breathtaking experience. Metaphorically though, what is my Carcassonne? What will quench the yearning in my soul for these certain places that, even after seeing them several times, I am still being pulled back to? Is the reason I keep searching because I am trying to find my past? Am I what I have always believed...an Ancient Soul? Perhaps what I am seeking can not be found; a unobtainable understanding? Again, the longer I live, the more questions I have..........Each mortal has his Carcassonne!
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