The late Victorians, our intellectual parents in so many ways, jettisoned the religious pilgrimage for a different kind of quest—the search for a landscape in key with their own inchoate yearnings. Paris and Rome retained their complicated allure, of course, but other places began to emerge from history's dustbin. For Marcel Proust and Claude Monet, Henry Adams and Henry James, a meander through Normandy was the intellectual pilgrimage at its multilayered finest. The austere stone architecture and poplar-studded pastures suggested a lost world of spiritual certainty and aesthetic decorum, a place where the secrets of the past opened up new meanings for the fraught and uncertain present. And so it was for me....more