2006-03-16 - 12:09 p.m.
I am supposed to be working on my thesis while Helen does her laundry, but instead I have been reading Virginia Woolf and watching a little brown mouse make his (or her) way around the kitchen. Yesterday when I went to made toast she (or he) was in the toaster!
Yesterday I went to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. This is the largest cathedral in the world. It was not a very ornate cathedral, but I still thought it beautiful. There was something about the immensity of interior space that made me feel my inner space expand and I felt as if I were taking on the form of a cathedral, with vaulted ceilings giving shape to my soul. The interior was also very dark. I really like this. Though so often light is associated with holy spaces, I have found that there is something in a dark space (the perfect example of this is my beloved St. Bart's) that captures the stillness, the privacy, the necessarily shadowed (by the limits of our finite understanding) approach to holiness. I love cathedrals. I love the hugeness, the solidity, the way they seem so connected to the earth even as they reach so high toward heaven. I love the shadows and the colored lights coming in through stained glass, the flickering of candles, the echo of hushed voices.
To change the subject-- From "A Room of One's Own" : 'delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a head of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-stick up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.'
And from THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK: "There's only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that second-best is anything but the second-best."
Signing out: Hannah.
