A building of this splendour positions the mind to the exercise of real contemplation, not to ‘glimpse’ at life but to take in it
For a while there, one of the monuments of Western civilization was in full peril, and we were, in the full etymological understanding of the word, astonished into contemplating what might be lost. The fire at Notre Dame, to our benefit, arrested the attention of the world and provoked reflections on matters that, in an age of distraction, ceaseless amusements and the cascade of every-streaming “information,” are not commonly entertained.
Awesome now is a shallow tribute to mini-explosions of satisfaction for matters eminently trivial and momentary — the latest Captain Marvel movie, or some pathetic putdown on Twitter. The cellphone camera freezes the life all around us into stored images of what is happening, mere mechanical glimpses of life, which we will “get back to” when the event of the moment is, in its own time, over. It’s a little like we’re “taping life” so that we can watch it later.
A building of this splendour positions the mind to the exercise of real contemplation, not to “glimpse” at life but to take in it. A famous aphorism has it that “architecture is frozen music,” by which is surely meant only great architecture and great music. The implied analogy is a good one.
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