I've been trying something different lately -- on weekends I try to very deliberately keep my mind off of work. The theory is that this will help me to make a more concentrated effort on the other five days of the week. We'll see how that goes over the next couple of weeks as my next book deadline approaches...
I spent a good chunk of this weekend reading a novel -- a pleasure that I don't allow myself often enough these days. My choice, something I thought I could probably manage to follow between soccer games with pre-schoolers and episodes of Bob the Builder, was a book that is not new but has recently become popular for a second time: Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, which tells the long and entertaining tale of a set of interconnected families in 12th century England, all joined together around the building of a town and a cathedral.
Now, this turns out to be a bit of a cheat for me because it is a novel about architecture, which in turn makes it difficult for me to read and to not think about work. It also made tiny mental wormholes for me with a fascinating conversation I'd had recently with a colleague. The topic was the number of different ways that we manage to create sacred spaces. Think of St. Peter's Basilica, or any other large cathedral that you might have been lucky enough to stumble into. The immediate effect of entering one of these huge, sacred vaults is to cause stillness. And I'm not just talking about a spiritual state here -- I mean that your legs become frozen. You stand in place, staring up and around. After standing still at the threshold for some time, you creep forward slowly, often clinging to the walls, like a timid mouse in a wide open field. This is an inherently biological response, and it is done deliberately.
My colleague described a different kind of response that he'd had to the numerous sacred sites he'd visited in Asia, which often consisted of cleverly interlocking small spaces that held you in thrall more with fascination than with shock and awe. A Buddhist temple is every bit as much a sacred space as a basilica, but the approach of the builders to the problem of bringing human minds to the sublime has been entirely different, if no less deliberate.
Those kinds of differences say very many things about how a culture or religion can use the organization of space to reinforce major themes, ideas, or world views. So my weekend jaunt through Follett has brought me to a new chapter opening.
There's just no escaping this thing.
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