"I had seen those films before as a child ..." she says, "but I had not known, had not noticed, until it was pointed out to me as an adult, that in the background on the horizon, kind of shrouded in mist, was the outline of a ship."
When she showed that home movie to a friend who was also a Navy captain, he immediately identified the ship as the USS Arizona, the vessel that was bombed during the Pearl Harbor attack.
"I began to be haunted ... by the juxtaposition of the toddler playing on the beach, laughing, and, in the background, 1,200 young men who very soon will almost all be dead," Lowry says.
It’s hard to blame the gargoyles. For a hundred and seventy-five years, they protected Notre-Dame de Paris from war, weather, and tourists—and, arguably, they managed to do the same under considerable duress one year ago, when, on April 15th, a blaze nearly destroyed one of the world’s most famous cathedrals. The fire started early in the evening, sparking in the dry rafters of the roof. Priests and firefighters raced to save the relics, liturgical artifacts, and art inside. They were largely successful, but within two hours the fire had spread throughout the roof, and the seven-hundred-and-fifty-ton spire had fallen, along with most of the latticed timbers of the vaulted ceiling.
Legend has it that gargoyles are supposed to prevent this sort of thing. Notre-Dame has some of the most famous grotesques in all of Europe, but the creatures, and that legend, originated in nearby Rouen. In the middle of the seventh century, the story goes, a water-spewing dragon was terrorizing that city, flooding its fields and eating its virgins—but when a priest (and soon-to-be saint) named Romanus approached it with a crucifix, the creature surrendered. Romanus burned the dragon at the stake, and, although the dragon’s body turned to ash, its head, apparently made of some kind of demonic or dragonic Kevlar, would not catch fire. So Romanus erected what was left of the beast outside his church, where, eventually, rain started to pour through it. Mounted dragon heads then became a thing, and soon churches all around Europe had waterspouts carved to look like dragons. In French, the word for gargoyle—gargouille—has origins in the words for throat and gurgle.
Notre-Dame has its fair share of gargoyles, but, as lexicographers would have you know, its most famous beastly adornments don’t qualify: those demonic-looking lions, dogs, elephants, and birds that line the roof don’t channel water and are therefore technically called chimeras. In a new book that surveys the nine hundred years between when the cathedral was built and when it nearly burned down, the novelist Ken Follett explains how those creatures came to be part of it, and argues that their addition, in the nineteenth century, marked the beginning of the cathedral’s architectural and cultural renaissance. It is a timely reminder that change is a part of the life of such places and that renovation can do more than just return us to the status quo. “Notre-Dame: A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals” (Viking) was written in a single week, immediately after last year’s fire, and, because Follett’s proceeds from the book are being donated to the restoration fund, it is meant not only to commemorate the building’s past but to help insure its future.
But there is no rush in reading, nor in walking. In fact, it is better not to rush. When my body finally settled and my mind quieted, I felt attuned to the lowest of frequencies, from within and without. I burrowed deeper into the reading, into myself, and for a moment, I felt like a loch, “withdrawn and tranquil.”
But for my old New Yorkers, I've devised a ritual that allows me to avoid thinking about them. I put copies at least a year old into a bag which I seal. I take a few days to forget about them, then throw the bag in the recycling bin.
Many people I know just let their New Yorkers accumulate endlessly. I'd happily do that too, if I hadn't many other subscriptions and didn't feel so guilty sacrificing them for old New Yorkers. I do not subscribe to Artforum, the subject and title of César Aira's newest novella — translated by Katherine Silver — but if I did, its supposed magical properties would solve a lot of my problems.
Step 1 from Kingsley Amis: Drink wine ‘in quantity.’