Twelfth-century visitors-1163 was the year of the cathedral’s first groundbreaking-had never seen vaults this high. Once admitted, they shuffle along in the direction of the high altar: distant-east, where in the Middle Ages, the rising sun was believed to offer life to all on this altar table of sacrifice and commemoration. Visitors, most days, line up outside the cathedral on the Parvis, the large plaza in front of it and parallel to the equestrian statue of a heroic Charlemagne (who was, in fact, short, fat, ugly, and illiterate). “ Skip Notre-Dame, skip the whole Cité,” my friend Beryl, a child of the Bible Belt, had advised when I was planning my first trip to the City of Light. Another tourist mecca, an exemplar of mass tourism. “ Disneyland,” sneered a bearded young man to his partner. You might also sense a ho-hum indifference as you find yourself stuck inside swarms of tourists.
Visitors, thirteen million a year, have mixed reactions to the “Virgin’s Church.” In the stillness, there’s a feeling of reverence. Notre-Dame, the mother of cathedrals all over Europe. Beauty, the deep blue mother light, now touches the ancient church everywhere, through every window, in every corner, chapel, aisle. The cathedral, with its high-to-the-sky windows-“medieval blue”-is the love object here. That line from a poem by-the name now comes to me- e. When you’re inside Notre-Dame, standing in the Crossing, looking north at the Rose Window-the northern rose, with its stories from the Old Testament-there is sometimes, no matter what the weather outside, a dim light or glow flash flooding blue and rose upon massive gray stone pillars. It never crossed my mind that I would not be inside Notre-Dame again, would not lay eyes on la belle mère de Paris for years. “ The sapphire I know is there,” wrote Denise Levertov. Colored light shooting down from the high church’s high windows to hit statues and pillars and people. As I stood now in the Crossing, at my back a statue of Jeanne d’Arc on her horse and just next to me the famous statue of the “ Virgin of Paris”-“ so overpoweringly lovely and inaccessible,” wrote the architectural critic Allan Temko-“ an Empress of Heaven.… She is Notre-Dame of Paris, she was … medieval France”-all of a sudden, on that dull November day, the sun came out. I’ve been inside the cathedral many times since my first long-ago visit to Paris.
There was no line outside, a rarity on the Parvis. I last entered Notre-Dame on a chilly gray afternoon in November 2018. “Lovers alone wear sunlight,” an American poet wrote.
0 kommentar(er)
