#152 Traveling with Pilgrim, pt. 1

While returning from Indianapolis this morning, I pulled out my tape player and tapes and held them up to the heater on the dash. Left my briefcase in the car overnight at 27 degrees, every voice was verrrrrry slooooooowly telling me the story of Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan.

I had never read this Christian classic, so had checked out the dramatized version from the church library. A foreign language major in college, I was not required to take any English or American literature courses, and feel somewhat uneducated in my own language’s heritage. Pilgrim’s Progress is a classic for good reason--next to the Bible, this title has probably sold more copies than any other because it is completely understandable in any language, any era, any medium.

Bunyan endured twelve years of imprisonment for his faith, and during this time developed the concepts that appear in Pilgrims Progress which he released in 1678. Pilgrim’s Progress has absolutely no subtlety. It is an allegory, and the characters Pilgrim meets have names like Sloth, Faithful, Hopeful, Formalist, Timorous, Mistrust, Prudence and Piety, Flatterer, Ignorance and Atheist. No problem at all figuring out their role in Pilgrim’s journey.

The places he visits on his way the Celestial Kingdom when he gets off the straight and narrow highway are Vanity Fair and Lucre and a prison in the Land of Doubt. It was in the Land of Doubt that he and Hopeful are entrapped and imprisoned by the giant named Despair with “rats and bats, mice and lice” and they are beaten unmercifully and encouraged to commit suicide. Perhaps it was my imagination, but Bunyan seemed to spend more time and description on the dungeons and dragons of Despair than any other challenge.

Through the good Christians of Mt. Zion Church in Pensacola Florida, you can download in html, RTF, PDF or text file the complete works of John Bunyan. There is a Quick Time movie, Illustrated Overview of Pilgrim’s Progress by Judith Bronte with music on the web.

Traveling with Pilgrim, pt. 2

After writing about listening to this famous classic on tape while returning from Indianapolis, I suddenly remembered I might have a print copy. I looked in the obvious places, finally locating it in a small stack of books not pretty enough or sturdy enough to be displayed with my other old books. I had picked it up about ten years ago for a dime at a yard sale.

Its bibliographic details and provenance are: edited for school use by George W. Latham, published in Chicago and New York by Scott, Foresman and Company in a series called “The Lake English Classics,” in 1906. However, it still had a bookplate declaring it a part of War Service Library, of the American Library Association, stamped “Camp Library, Camp Funston, Kansas, presented by the faculty and students, Sioux Falls High School, Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The introduction is reprinted at Wholesome Words.