So they set up the camera, and after the usual delay when the director decided where to set up the shot, and the cameraman and his focus-puller fiddled about with lenses and filters and reflectors and the sound man was satisfied about the level of background noise, and tile production assistant had stopped people walking in and out of shot behind me, I delivered my existentialist interpretation of the pilgrimage to camera. (Maureen by this time had got bore and, wandered off to look at the church.) I described the three stares in personal development according to Kierkegaard - the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious - and suggested that there were three corresponding types of pilgrim. (I had been thinking about this on the road.) The aesthetic type was mainly concerned with having a good time, enjoying the picturesque and cultural pleasures of the Camino. The ethical type saw the pilgrimage as essentially a test of stamina and self-discipline. He (or she) had a strict notion of what was correct pilgrim behaviour (no staying in hotels, for instance) and was very competitive with others on the road. The true pilgrim was the religious pilgrim, religious in the Kierkegaardian sense. To Kierkegaard, Christianity was "absurd": if it were entirely rational, there would be no merit in believing it. The whole point was that you chose to believe without rational compulsion - you made a leap into the void and in the process chose yourself. Walking a thousand miles to the shrine of Santiago without knowing whether there was anybody actually buried there was such a leap. The aesthetic pilgrim didn't pretend to be a true pilgrim. The ethical pilgrim was always worrying whether he was a true pilgrim. The true pilgrim just did it.

"Cut! Great. Thanks very much," said the director. "Get him to sign a release, Linda." Linda smiled at me, with pen poised over her clip board. "You'll get twenty-five pounds if we use it," she said "What's your name, please?"

"Laurence Passmore," I said.

(Lodge, David: Therapy, London: Secker & Warburg 1995, S. 304-305)