Mont Saint Michel
You’ll know you’ve arrived when it feels like you must be dreaming and you cease to believe your senses. You’re at the coast but you don’t realize it yet. Enveloped in mist, smelling brine, you peer offshore at five wild white mares galloping full speed on top of a perfectly still slate-grey sea. Snaking through that sea are rivers of golden light bridging the shore and the horizon, while waist-deep in the widest river a procession of pilgrims marches at a pious speed– the speed of the clouds blooming cumulous overhead, the speed of their shadows growing longer across that still sea– making way towards an impossible sight: an island, an incomprehensible architecture of soaring turrets, mountain stone, and slate-shingled roofs, floating on the bay at the confluence of those golden rivers. It must be a magic spell cast on the misty bay that allows the horses to run atop the water, the pilgrims to wade through that liquid light.
Squinting through the spell you’re forced to wonder whether you’re witness to the sacred or the profane, and in this way you’ll know you’re looking out at Mont Saint Michel.
You believe, as you make camp that night along the dyke of a polder, bedding down next to the flocked sheep, starting the cooking fire, watching the oil lamps of the distant mont trail down the inky canal, that the proof ought to come in the morning.
The morning comes and the mont is still there. Today you could test that improbable vision; walk across the mudflats, stamp on the cobbled streets, rap your knuckles raw against the curtain walls and ascend to the high cathedral to see song leave the lips of the choir. You could press your nose to the moss growing on the slate tiling and breathe it, find the rusty skeleton key and turn it, slip into the musty catacombs and inspect the ancient foundations block by block. You could stay, if you wanted, for days or years, breathing and touching and listening. But would all that evaluation make it more real, more true?
Sitting across the bay as the morning alights, that natural drive to empiricism might seem unnecessary, improvident, ignorant. Perhaps it’s better to place your faith in intuition, revelation. Having seen it, though, you can’t unsee it. So now it is your decision– whether to advance on the mont or to leave it be, as it is, a vision out there on a still grey sea.