According to Chaucer, April is the month when people "long to go on pilgrimages." In his day, when the urge hit, people struck out for Canterbury to see the cathedral and its relics. Of course, that was England in the Middle Ages, but something like the same idea probably still applies. Spring break commonly falls in April, though trips to the beach or Disneyland are much more common than pilgrimages to holy shrines nowadays.
When I was younger, I took it for granted that people were just more pious in the Middle Ages, but now I suspect that for many pilgrims, devotion was just an excuse for a vacation, a break from the everyday grind. For them, going to Canterbury was something like going to Daytona, or even Vegas.
I've actually been to Canterbury, though I didn't do it according to the Chaucer plan. I arrived there on a bus, in the month of July, with my camera and my grandmother. (This was the same summer I traipsed around half of southern England looking at Gothic buildings.) I was very interested in what you might call the numinous properties of Gothic, but I wouldn't term myself a pilgrim in the strict sense of the word. I was more interested in aesthetic, historic, and imaginative inspiration than in a religious experience, and I wasn't disappointed in what I saw.
I remember that Canterbury Cathedral could be seen from a long way off across the countryside; once it came into view it towered over everything else. I imagine that for medieval pilgrims, regardless of their original motivations for taking the trip, the constant and ever more dominating presence of the object of their journey must have been awe-inspiring, perhaps a bit like approaching the doors of heaven. It would have been the presence around which everything else arranged itself, like Wallace Stevens' jar upon the hill in "Anecdote of the Jar." This was probably true even for the most jaded.
Can you imagine traveling with such a crowd today? I suppose it wouldn't be unlike a bus tour or a cruise, in which you're thrown in with such a random sampling of humanity that there's no telling who you might be sitting next to, knave, fool, criminal, or saint. Although it's been a while since I read The Canterbury Tales, my recollection is that while the last group was in short supply, the other three categories were amply represented. Perhaps it's unfair, since it's been a while since I read the Tales, but when I ask myself now if I would have chosen to take such a journey with a crew like that, the answer is no. It may just be that the rogues stand out more in my memory. It's also true that I've never been one for group travel to begin with.
Of course, I'm being a little facetious. Chaucer's idea, I think, in depicting such a cavalcade of characters is to provide amusement. It's a comedy, with all the vices (and virtues, naturally) of humanity on display. You're meant to recognize, with a wry smile, characters that remind you of people you know (and perhaps yourself, if you tend toward introspection). The Canterbury Tales is, after all, a species of armchair travel. You're not actually on the trip--you're at one remove from it. Except insofar as life itself is a journey . . . but never mind that . . . Chaucer has made it possible for you to just sit back and enjoy this one.
If you're making any spring journeys of your own, safe travels. Watch out for the other guy and all that. As for me, I'm going no farther than the local coffeehouse, where you may see me ensconced with Paul Theroux's The Pillars of Hercules. I've gone by sea, by air, by rail, by land, and on foot, but right now armchair travel is what I like best.
Showing posts with label Gothic architecture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gothic architecture. Show all posts
Thursday, April 2, 2015
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Glimpsed Through the Fog
The other night I was watching a program about Gothic cathedrals. The lecturer's enthusiasm reminded me of the way I felt one long-ago summer when I was in England and explored everything Gothic I could find--chapels, churches, colleges, train stations, government buildings, cathedrals--you name it. If it was Gothic, I walked around, climbed around, photographed, and inspected it. I'd written a paper about Gothic architecture in a Victorian literature class for my M.A. and been swept off my feet by John Ruskin's descriptions. His soaring prose seemed to capture the essence of an architectural style carved in stone but aspiring to mystical dimensions.
Well, why wouldn't you be captivated by an architecture that finds delicacy, bravado, solemnity, ecstasy, darkness, light, ethereal beauty, and pride of workmanship in the earthiest of materials: stone, wood, and glass? A Gothic cathedral suggests, by its scale, that there's more to existence than meets the eye--and therefore, that there may be more to us than meets the eye. If out of those elemental materials a builder can create towering spires, soaring galleries, and light-filled apses that seem to float, maybe it's an indication that the things of this world are more than they appear to be.
Of course, mysticism is very Platonic, but the solidity of materials and the proliferation of so many individual saints, prophets, kings, and everyday people, created in loving and expressive detail in statuary and stained glass on every available surface, shows an Aristotelian regard for earthly life, too. It would have been impossible for a builder to put up a 140-foot ceiling or build a wall made of glass without a careful working out of scientific principles and advanced problem solving.
I think my Platonic streak was wider when I was younger, because it was really the mysteriousness of the Gothic buildings, the way they presented themselves as way-stations to something beyond, that appealed to me. I know I'm more Aristotelian now because, after listening to the lecturer emphasize over and over the other night that the ceilings of the cathedrals were built of solid stone, I wondered why it had never occurred to me to keep a sharp lookout for loose pieces. I probably still have the mystic streak, but it's accompanied now by a greater awareness of material fragility and principles of physics.
When the lecturer was speaking of Amiens Cathedral, I had a sudden flashback to an incident I hadn't thought about in years. That same English summer, I went to France, in the middle of my summer course, for a weekend in Paris. It was a rough bus ride after a choppy ferry crossing and a sleepless night, and at the time this seemed the very pinnacle of travel discomfort (which makes me laugh now, I can tell you). I was tired and rather disenchanted.
Sometime in the early hours of the morning, the bus stopped in a town somewhere north and east of Paris. As the bus started to move again, I glimpsed, through the fog and darkness of early morning, a huge Gothic facade looming over the bus, ghostly, half visible, and then gone. It was easily more breathtaking than anything I later saw in Paris, though it vanished almost before I was aware of it. The unexpectedness made it seem marvelous, as if it had appeared out of the air like some enchanted castle from an Arthurian tale.
I wondered what it was that I saw, and I still do. I didn't found out at the time, having no clear conception of where we were and no chance to ask anyone (in my halting French) who might actually have been awake and in the know. Was it Amiens? Rouen? Maybe sometime I'll go there again and find out, though I have to say not knowing hasn't bothered me.
One thing I learned then, but had to be reminded of later, was that something numinous can open up right in front of you even when you're tired, irritated, hot, and overwhelmed by the experience of being on your way to Paris for the first time. It's probably not even on the itinerary, that thing you remember all your life and would have missed if you'd only figured out how to sleep sitting up. Even with a greater respect now for gravity, loose mortar, and the ravages of time, I prize the memory of that ethereal scene granted to a grumpy but wide-eyed traveler.
Well, why wouldn't you be captivated by an architecture that finds delicacy, bravado, solemnity, ecstasy, darkness, light, ethereal beauty, and pride of workmanship in the earthiest of materials: stone, wood, and glass? A Gothic cathedral suggests, by its scale, that there's more to existence than meets the eye--and therefore, that there may be more to us than meets the eye. If out of those elemental materials a builder can create towering spires, soaring galleries, and light-filled apses that seem to float, maybe it's an indication that the things of this world are more than they appear to be.
Of course, mysticism is very Platonic, but the solidity of materials and the proliferation of so many individual saints, prophets, kings, and everyday people, created in loving and expressive detail in statuary and stained glass on every available surface, shows an Aristotelian regard for earthly life, too. It would have been impossible for a builder to put up a 140-foot ceiling or build a wall made of glass without a careful working out of scientific principles and advanced problem solving.
I think my Platonic streak was wider when I was younger, because it was really the mysteriousness of the Gothic buildings, the way they presented themselves as way-stations to something beyond, that appealed to me. I know I'm more Aristotelian now because, after listening to the lecturer emphasize over and over the other night that the ceilings of the cathedrals were built of solid stone, I wondered why it had never occurred to me to keep a sharp lookout for loose pieces. I probably still have the mystic streak, but it's accompanied now by a greater awareness of material fragility and principles of physics.
When the lecturer was speaking of Amiens Cathedral, I had a sudden flashback to an incident I hadn't thought about in years. That same English summer, I went to France, in the middle of my summer course, for a weekend in Paris. It was a rough bus ride after a choppy ferry crossing and a sleepless night, and at the time this seemed the very pinnacle of travel discomfort (which makes me laugh now, I can tell you). I was tired and rather disenchanted.
Sometime in the early hours of the morning, the bus stopped in a town somewhere north and east of Paris. As the bus started to move again, I glimpsed, through the fog and darkness of early morning, a huge Gothic facade looming over the bus, ghostly, half visible, and then gone. It was easily more breathtaking than anything I later saw in Paris, though it vanished almost before I was aware of it. The unexpectedness made it seem marvelous, as if it had appeared out of the air like some enchanted castle from an Arthurian tale.
I wondered what it was that I saw, and I still do. I didn't found out at the time, having no clear conception of where we were and no chance to ask anyone (in my halting French) who might actually have been awake and in the know. Was it Amiens? Rouen? Maybe sometime I'll go there again and find out, though I have to say not knowing hasn't bothered me.
One thing I learned then, but had to be reminded of later, was that something numinous can open up right in front of you even when you're tired, irritated, hot, and overwhelmed by the experience of being on your way to Paris for the first time. It's probably not even on the itinerary, that thing you remember all your life and would have missed if you'd only figured out how to sleep sitting up. Even with a greater respect now for gravity, loose mortar, and the ravages of time, I prize the memory of that ethereal scene granted to a grumpy but wide-eyed traveler.
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