Word: pilgrimate
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Many Americans could be forgiven if they entertained a fantasy from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Unstuck in time, the character named Billy Pilgrim runs a movie of World War II in his head-backward: "When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business...
...Henry David Thoreau thought so and wrote a lot about walking, including an essay titled Walking to be read by people who were sitting. Thoreau provided a lot of health food for thought, including an explanation of the word "sauntering," which he saw as a fermentation of the medieval pilgrim's phrase, à la Sainte Terre-to the Holy Land...
...people believed Billy Pilgrim actually went to the planet of Trafalmadore and I doubt if many more will believe that I have lived among the Yalies. But I have, and may someday write a book about it, though I am neither Gulliver nor Herodetus. Suffice it here to note a singular occupational Harvard for a Harvardman at Yale: showing one's true colors. Examples follow...
After a hard day on the battlements, medieval warriors used to unwind with a spirited round or two. The Pilgrim fathers had at it on the Mayflower. And even good King George VI and his wife Queen Elizabeth were known to have had a fling. Over the centuries, the venerable game of darts became such a craze, in fact, that in 1939, on the eve of World War II, the British House of Commons engaged in a heated debate over the banning of darts in Scottish pubs. Darting not only fostered "ne'er-do-wellism," a Scottish magistrate...
Four other cardinals joined Krol as pilgrims to the Kolbe memorial at Auschwitz, including Poland's Primate Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, and John Cardinal Wright-the only other American cardinal, besides Krol, ever to enter Communist Poland. But it was Krol's visit that became the gala pilgrim's progress. When he arrived in his late father's home village of Siekierczyna, Krol was greeted by several dozen horsemen in the 17th century uniforms of Polish cavalry, who led him grandly to a brass-band welcome amid throngs of cheering villagers. After Mass in the village church...