Cathedrals

"We are the artists of the time,
We dream in sculpture, dream in rhyme
For you we bring our world alive
So something will survive.

From nowhere came the age of the cathedrals,

the old world began-

a new unknown thousand years.

For man just has to climb up where the stars are,

and live beyond life-

live in glass and live in stone"

-Musical Notre Dame de Paris

"Les Temps des Cathedrales" (Age of the Cathedrals)

Nave of St. Sernin's Cathedral
Toulouse, France

      My neck stars to ache, but I cannot stop. I am looking up, falling up into the rib vaults of the ambulatory here at St. Sernin's Cathedral. Just six months earlier, I had seen this image in my art history books, but the Art Through the Ages had not prepared me for this. The precision of each stone, the magnitude of each vault is overwhelming. Looking up at the tip of the dome, I literally fell upwards; I felt as if I was being sucked into the dome.

     Cathedrals inspire me not only with their sheer magnitudes, but also with the philosophy embedded in them. Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals with their astounding naves, a long hollow hallway with a ceiling so high, encasing a space so large, allow me to feel both solitude and togetherness at the same time. Cathedrals are about craftsmanship, but they're ultimately about "living beyond life" as Gringoire in the musical Notre Dame de Paris puts it. No cathedral was built in just one generation- the people who worked on the cathedral knew they would not live to see it finished. Yet so many people within one community, all members in the community, worked tirelessly on them. All these people while building the cathedral transcended their daily lives, forgetting individualism and tying themselves as a part of a larger society. Cathedrals were not one person's art, they were owned by the community at large. This meme regarding individualism and at the same time, community, is the key idea represented by cathedrals.