SOUNDTRACK: hiatus
[READ: December 21, 2021] “The Three Hermits”
This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my seventh time reading the Calendar. The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.
As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check this link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.
By the time I saw Leo Tolstoy I was getting a little annoyed by the end of this collection. Nothing against Tolstoy at all–we should all read him more, but again, I wanted a contemporary writer to get excited by.
And then this story turned out to be exactly the same as Ray Bradbury’s story (obviously Tolstoy was first), but it was less satisfying.
Basically, a bishop is aboard a ship and is told by the pilgrims on board that there’s an island nearby with three very holy hermits. Naturally the busybody bishop needs to see them to make sure they are praying correctly. So he disrupts the entire voyage, making everyone else delay their travels for at least a full day, so he can be a pain in the ass to these poor hermits.
He tries to teach them about god, but they don’t understand him.
Finally he teaches them to phonetically learn the Our Father.
As they sail away one of the crew notices that a sailboat is trying to overtake them. But they soon see it is not a sailboat, but the three hermits running atop the water, of course.
They catch the ship and say that they have forgotten the prayer again.
But the bishop assumes that since they ran across the water an all, they must be on to something and tells them to carry on as they were. No one on the ship seems pissed that they wasted a whole day for absolutely nothing.
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