A San Fermin pedimos
Last week combatted covid isolation watching several films, both YouTube and Amazon, read one-and-a-half of two most recent issues of The New Yorker, thence to several books including Hemingway's in our time collection of short stories (1925) and all but the final chapter of The Sun Also Rises.
Sunday is always a favorite day. Up early, three a.m. is the standing target for Sunday, definitely if I am in the pulpit that day. Not so yesterday, so going back to sleep after visiting with Father Nature about midnight, slept soundly until three-fifteen, then up for coffee and further to contemplate Sunday School class. Water and the other half of Saturday's jumbo beef-burger for breakfast - - chopped sirloin seared outside, red inside at first, but cooked through when warmed for re-run. mustard & mayo, cheese a cheddar and a gouda.
Started a rainy Sunday morning. Phone turned off. Rite One Eucharistic Prayer II, Sunday School gathering in the parish library, Rite Two Eucharistic Prayer B. Home.
Change clothes, martini, dirty, two anchovy-stuffed olives; shaker filled with ice, vermouth always the same but l like to vary the gin (yesterday Tanqueray), and the vodka (yesterday Stolichnaya), spoon of mixed nuts to munch on, two saltine crackers with pimiento cheese.
For Sunday dinner, large crab cakes loaded with crabmeat, Brussels sprouts a la M Darrah, perfect. Ice water.
Nap, one-fifteen to three o'clock. Cup of hot cocoa mix stirred into extra strong hot black coffee.
Open laptop and finish Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, set in Europe in 1924, mainly Paris, Pamplona, Spain, the bull run. The story
finishes inevitably, dismally, hopelessly, and years too late with Jake and Brett, the pathetic Lady Ashley, in a taxicab in Madrid.
Writers, American expats, and British, living in Paris and all around Europe. The racism is not up to Mark Twain's naturally enculturated racism, but competitive, so, culturally, not for 21st century school assignment.
The inane, unremarkable conversations (hot Hemingway's writing, the people themselves) can drive crazy, but as with many novels about that era just before my own, I got into the mind of it and did not want to return.
The horse drawn cab rides, the trains, the hire cars. The large trout caught in a week of fishing in icy cold Spanish streams.
However, narrated style, not value-added-to-life, but worthless lives of self and alcohol and pleasure are everyone's focus, wines, liqueurs, whiskey & soda, martinis in a cool bar on a hot day outside. Would I really go there - - and stay, not come back? What's the appeal?
Given choices, would I live in that time between the world wars, people seemingly as self-centered and hedonistic as A Catcher in the Rye, or today in the hatred divisions that I see America becoming? IDK, I might choose today because modern medical science has several times saved my life and given me more years that I would not have had in those years. But I like their cars better.
What's appealing? It isn't running before the bulls, or fighting the bulls like Brett's 19-year-0ld bullfighter, it's watching others "bravely" run before the bulls, like ice hockey, pretending to be there for the sport, but knowing one'll see some blood.
The Surprisingly Practical History Behind Spain's Running of the Bulls
Like many of the world’s most famous traditions, the annual “running of the bulls” in Pamplona, Spain—the encierro—has somewhat foggy origins.
Each July, thousands arrive from across the world in Pamplona from July 7-14 for the San Fermin Festival, named for the patron saint of the town in Spain’s northern Basque region, and to hear the bulls’ hooves hit the cobblestone streets each morning as they charge toward the bold participants, who run them from a pen to the nearby bull ring, where bull fights commence.
The tradition may date back to the 13th century and, though it can now sound like a pretty frivolous thing to do (and several runners have died throughout the run’s history) the origins of running with bulls were very practical.
As TIME reported in 1937, the practice of racing in front of bulls to guide them to their pens or ring was in place before the festival began. It was typically used by cattle herders and butchers attempting to guide bulls from the barges on which they arrived to town, to an enclosure in the middle of the night. It’s not entirely clear when townspeople joined in on the run as a feat of bravery.
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Meanwhile, the fiesta of San Fermin was carried on as a religious event intended to honor Pamplona’s first bishop, San Fermin, who was beheaded in France while preaching the gospel in the early the third century. The event was held in the fall, rather than in July. Eventually, as the run became a Pamplona tradition rather than just a thing that butchers did for work, the more religious aspects of San Fermin and the encierro merged.
The modern running course for the bull run was set up sometime later to prevent bulls from escaping into the streets. Peter N. Milligan, a 46-year-old New Jersey lawyer and author of the memoir Bulls Before Breakfast, who has run with the bulls more than 70 times, says townspeople date the modern running course back to 1776, though he admits there aren’t “really good records” for the run’s origins.
The July fiesta in Pamplona was later romanticized by Ernest Hemingway’s visit and resulting novel The Sun Also Rises in 1926, as well as by the countless tales of revelers who had lived to tell their tales.
By now, Pamplona’s isn’t the only bull run in Spain, let alone the world. Even the United States has had a few bull runs of its own — though some, like Milligan, say those aren’t real bull runs.
“Pamplona is like the Super Bowl of the bull runs,” he says.
And there, despite less than glamorous beginnings, tradition endures.
Even today, Milligan says, revelers ask San Fermin for protection and guidance before the run. (scroll down)
