The sacred

Today was my introduction to the Paris Métro (as well as an intercity train between Paris and Chartres and the RER, which offers express trains between central Paris and the Paris suburbs). I liked the Métro, and I love being in a city that is connected by train to so many other places. One thing I learned about the Métro and the train station during rush hour is not to stop moving when walking between trains. If you have to stop to orient yourself, pull over to the side, just like you would in a car. You're one particle moving among a stream of high-velocity particles who know their way around, and they will keep moving even if you stop. I don't generally enjoy crowds, but I do like watching experts maneuvering their way through a subway or train station. The train station was a great place for people-watching.

The trip today started with a visit to Chartres, about an hour outside of Paris. It is a smallish town, pretty in its own right (at least the parts I saw). The Eure River runs picturesquely through town, and there are some very old half-timbered houses.

Chartres is also home to a large and beautiful cathedral. The cathedral is certainly the biggest thing in town; it makes navigation relatively easy because the towers are a useful reference point.

The church is home to a relic, a length of silk that is supposedly the garment that the virgin Mary was wearing when she gave birth to Jesus. Several churches dedicated to Mary have stood on this spot, and after a fire in the late 12th century, the relic was believed to be lost but then was found intact after all. This was taken as a miracle and motivated people to rebuild the church better than ever as a center of pilgrimage. (People still come on pilgrimage to see this relic, which surprised me.) It was constructed within a remarkably short period of time (the fire was in 1194, and much of the new church was completed by around 1250), which gives it a unity of style that is not always a feature of the big cathedrals of the time. Much of the stained glass is intact, and the stonework is undergoing renovation. The main entrance was obscured by scaffolding; this is the south porch (I believe the stone on the upper parts has already been cleaned).

We investigated the church on our own and also went on a tour led by Malcolm Miller, an Englishman who came to visit 54 years ago, fell in love with the cathedral, and has stayed on and studied it ever since. He is a witty and highly knowledgeable guide; if you're ever in Chartres, I recommend one of his tours (daily Monday-Saturday at noon and 2:45). He described the cathedral as a book, one that told a story in stained glass and statues, and one that the illiterate people at the time it was built would have known how to read. He sees the building as encapsulating the complex Christian worldview of the time; he gave us an idea of how the stories told in the stained glass and in the statues are related to each other and are interwoven to create the larger story of loss and redemption. I don't believe in this story myself, but I am fascinated by the idea of using an entire building as an information system to store and transmit the knowledge considered essential in a particular time and place.

The older I get, the more I realize the degree to which effective communication depends on a shared reference system, and the degree to which subtle and unexpected differences in reference systems can trip people up. Some days I'm amazed that any human brain can ever convey any meaningful idea to another human brain with any degree of precision, even for two brains of the same generation, country, and language. I guess that's one reason history is so interesting to me; the possibility of getting into the mindset of people in another place and time, much less one so long ago and one that has had such an influence on our world, is really exciting, even if the insight is bound to be only partial. (Plus, of course, the sheer scale of the thing and the beauty of the old stone and the stained glass made me go "Oooooo!")