That was a glorious re-immersion in and celebration of poignant places from my past, and the most poignant of all was Notre-Dame Cathedral. Notre-Dame is one of the planet’s touchstone places for me, and this essay was, in a sense, an attempt to stop time: to focus on a remembered moment in a place, and to dive archaeologically into the imaginative and emotional layers of that moment. I was intensely surprised and stirred by the layers that excavation revealed. NOTRE-DAME FROM THE OUTSIDE IS MAGNIFICENT, monumental, solidly of the earth and yet soaringly not. But for all its monumental permanence, its context is clearly the present: Visitors pose, focus, click; portable stalls sell sandwiches and postcards; tourist groups shuffle by in ragtag formation. Walk through those massive, humbling doors, though, and suddenly you breathe the air of antiquity. Let your mind and eyes adjust to the inner light, and you begin to realize that there is much more to Paris than the life of its streets, and a small sense of its magnificent and moving past comes back to you.
What do You think about The Way Of Wanderlust (2015)?
