Unbalanced Vision

"It is in this arena of possibility that I see the real strength of pilgrimage literature. It is an arena full of uncertainty and doubt about pilgrimage itself, considered as a means of access to the divine, but just as pilgrimage 'on the ground' has survived a history of corruption and abuse, so pilgrimage in literature, even more resourceful, has insistently reasserted itself as faith and belief have inevitably ebbed away, and remains a dominating image of search for the impossible--or rather for possibility".
Philip Edwards, Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 4.