Fairies do exist, and you can see them whilst browsing

Somewhere between enchantment and grandeur lies Sylvain Tesson, a traveller and poet of the boundless spaces in which to find oneself. He has recounted such experiences in Sentieri neri (Sellerio), in which he crossed France to recover from illness, and in Bianco (Sellerio), a journey steeped in silence and mirages. Now, he is hunting for fairies along the blue arc linking Spanish Galicia to the Scottish Shetland Islands. A sailing trip with two companions, Humann and Benoît, becomes a transfiguration of the sea, the clouds, myths and fairies: ‘A fairy is a quality of reality revealed by a certain way of looking. It is a way of perceiving the world and of discerning the miracle within it. The sun’s reflection on the sea, the rustling of the wind through the leaves of a beech tree, blood on the snow, the dew glistening on an animal’s fur: that is where the fairies are’ and Tesson reveals them to us in the book *i* *In barca a vela con le fate* , pages that sing of cormorants, gannets and petrels, but above all of writing imbued with grace.

The author sets out on a journey, inspired by a passage from Joë Bousquet’s Lettres à une jeune fille: ‘Take this truth to heart: everything that exists, everything, is like a dormant song, waiting only for a pure gaze to bring it back to life’ and sets out, hour after hour, in search of the marvellous that slumbers: indeed, this book teaches us to recognise that even rubble bleeds foam and light, that the song of the seagulls is the eternity of the sea. One need only know how to look and allow oneself to be enveloped by a childlike sense of wonder. We set off from Spain; the sea never tires, and the three friends know that every ‘headland holds three treasures: promise, memory, presence. We are on a western headland, eager to see what will emerge (the promise), happy with what we carry with us (memory) and camped on the cliff (the present)’. Ahead, the waves are like folds of silk and eternal dust, in the style of Lucretius. But Tesson’s references are many: Homer, of course, Hugo, Nietzsche, Apollinaire, Keats, Shelley and Byron, also to discover where the Celtic spirit originates and what remains of it today.

The crossing of the Bay of Biscay takes three days, and ‘the fairy appears at the moment when the perfection of things allows us to cease even the slightest movement’. Simply to contemplate. Perhaps even from dry land, for Tesson combines his time at sea with exploratory and meditative walks: ‘the hinterland is the truth of a nation without the magic of dreams. If you wish to remain in the glimmer, you must walk the tightrope’. Brittany, where Celtic gentleness has embraced Christian love, is dotted with chapels and menhirs: ‘that landscape was perfect because it was untouched. Perfection is the immutable’ and ‘what suffices in itself is marvellous; what has not sufficed becomes supernatural’.”

Next, it is time for England, where ‘the landscape is a Celtic dream as seen by the Romantics: an image suspended amongst the broom, slightly kitsch, and supported by columnar basalt’, and where the author discovers the National Coastwatch Institution, founded in 1994 to compensate for the cuts to the Royal Navy imposed by Margaret Thatcher and run by volunteers whose aim is to scan the void, watch over the sky, ensure that nothing happens, take note of everything and, above all, derive joy from it. From cliff to cliff, the words of Geoffrey of Monmouth resurface – a sort of Atlantic Virgil – who, in the Historia Regum Britanniae, weaves an epic tale centred on the illegitimate birth of King Arthur, his father, the sovereign Uther Pendragon, the wizard Merlin, and the sword Excalibur. Then comes Chrétien de Troyes, who weaves into this story the mystery of the Grail, the Catholic faith and the Order of the Round Table.

Tesson weaves together history and tales, myth and glimmers of light; he is captivated by the alignments of Stonehenge, megaliths that have inspired the legends of the Celtic giants, formed the basis of the Breton revival and featured in the poetry of the nineteenth century. The boat rolls gently; the sun plays amongst the clouds; Wales, with its parade of castles, is pure beauty. And still more nautical miles: ‘Don’t forget to look,’ Brittany had told me. ‘Don’t forget to live,’ Wales had told me. ‘Don’t forget to love,’ the sea had told me. ‘What would Ireland have said?’, with its castles, its fjords, the enclosed fields of the bocage, and that which always separates and protects. From the beach on the Dingle Peninsula, the monk Saint Brendan set sail in the 6th century in a small wicker boat with a leather canopy, chasing the sun; he crossed the Atlantic in search of paradise on earth because ‘the dream is our legitimacy’.