My grandfather is in that cathedral, somehow, and my father will be, too, and somehow, like this, civilization endures.
"It's not just our cathedral, it's the world's." "It's our heritage." "Eight hundred years." "It's a friend." "It's unspeakable." "There are no words for it."
I said to my father that the cathedral is always the metaphor; we compare things to cathedrals; what do you say when the cathedral itself burns before your eyes?
I've walked past that cathedral so many times and thought, "That will be here even when we've all turned to dust."
Medieval cathedrals are designed for the illiterate; everything in them, however seemingly trivial, is meant to aid the memory.
If the French Republic were to be secularized, he asked, what would become of the cathedrals, the highest achievement of French art and civilization? Proust himself was agnostic, but he well understood how inextricable the cathedrals and their rites were from French civilization.
The cathedral, which shelters so many saints, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, kings, confessors, and martyrs that whole generations huddle in supplication and anxiety all the way to the porch entrances and, trembling, raise the edifice as a long groan under heaven while the angels smilingly lean over from the top of the galleries which, in the evening's blue and rose incense and the morning's blinding gold do seem to be "Heaven's balconies"-the cathedral, in its vastness, can grant asylum both to the man of letters and to the man of faith, to the vague dreamer as well as to the archeologist.
https://www.city-journal.org/notre-dame-cathedral-fire
"It's not just our cathedral, it's the world's." "It's our heritage." "Eight hundred years." "It's a friend." "It's unspeakable." "There are no words for it."
I said to my father that the cathedral is always the metaphor; we compare things to cathedrals; what do you say when the cathedral itself burns before your eyes?
I've walked past that cathedral so many times and thought, "That will be here even when we've all turned to dust."
Medieval cathedrals are designed for the illiterate; everything in them, however seemingly trivial, is meant to aid the memory.
If the French Republic were to be secularized, he asked, what would become of the cathedrals, the highest achievement of French art and civilization? Proust himself was agnostic, but he well understood how inextricable the cathedrals and their rites were from French civilization.
The cathedral, which shelters so many saints, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, kings, confessors, and martyrs that whole generations huddle in supplication and anxiety all the way to the porch entrances and, trembling, raise the edifice as a long groan under heaven while the angels smilingly lean over from the top of the galleries which, in the evening's blue and rose incense and the morning's blinding gold do seem to be "Heaven's balconies"-the cathedral, in its vastness, can grant asylum both to the man of letters and to the man of faith, to the vague dreamer as well as to the archeologist.
https://www.city-journal.org/notre-dame-cathedral-fire
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