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.