Gideon Lewis-Kraus on the idea of pilgrimage as pretext

“Part of what interested me so much about pilgrimage as a concept—what made me think it might work as a structure to hang a bunch of other stuff (questions of restlessness and purpose and forgiveness) on—was that, the more I read and talked and thought about it, the more capacious the idea seemed: Pretty much anything can be described as a pilgrimage. People talk about pilgrimages to Graceland or Cooperstown, or to see Saturn Devouring His Children at the Prado, or just to Flushing to get good soup dumplings, so one of the challenges I faced was how to limit the discussion. There’s a whole bit in the book where I talk about why, for example, I chose not to convert to Islam to go on the hajj. But what it ultimately came down to, for me, was the idea of pilgrimage as pretext: It’s an arduous (which, obviously, means very different things to different people, but the implication is at least some minimal experience of inconvenience or austerity) trip where the eventual arrival is generally besides the point, at least in retrospect.”
–Gideon Lewis-Kraus, interviewed in World Hum, April 25, 2012