Skip to main content

Icons

It's a weird thing to finally see something that you have been familiar with all your life and see how your imagination compares with the real thing. The Eifel Tower for instance is far bigger than I had imagined it to be; Seurat's paintings of people by the Seine far far smaller. I guess it's this touching base with the furniture we stock our minds with that led to one particularly odd observation this week.

The day before yesterday was the first Sunday of the month and entrance to the Louvre was free. We made it there 15 minutes before opening time but there were already at least a thousand people in the queue before us; by opening time there were 4 or 5 times that many in line behind us, but I guess the good folk at the Louvre are used to that and we were x-rayed vetted and admitted within 10 minutes of the door's opening. Like almost everyone else,acting on the let's get it over and done with policy, we headed straight upstairs to see the Mona Lisa. The scrum around the smirking old visage was 30 deep.She was ensconced behind bullet proof glass about 10 feet or so from the nearest observer. The museum people happily let the forest of arms holding digital cameras do their thing.There must be thousands upon thousands of pictures around of camera flash bouncing off the glass in front of the Mona Lisa. You could see more of the actual painting if you went down to the gift shop and bought a postcard, but we were all paying homage to an icon. Now here's the weird bit. 50 feet from the Mona Lisa are another 4 or 5 Leonardos. One of them, the picture of St. Mary and St. Elizabeth with the infants Jesus and John the Baptist is generally acknowledged to be a far more important work than the Mona Lisa. They have no protective glass and you can stand a metre from them, but no-one was stopping to look. People cruised past, glassily looking through the pictures as they passed. I saw several walk past holding video cameras, looking not at what was on the wall but at what was on the LCD screen.

The Louvre is vast. The crowds are easily swallowed up and once you get away from the great icons - the Venus De Milo, Winged Victory, La Gioconda and so forth - the salons are comparitively empty. We left in time to attend Mass in Notre Dame. Since then we have visited the extraordinary collections in the Orangerie and the Musee D'Orsay. These places pick up the story of art where the Louvre leaves off in the mid 19th Century. A whole gallery of Rodin and room after room of all the people you would come up with if someone bet you to name 50 great painters. The museums, like Paris itself, contain treasures at every turn, too many to mention. Some are icons to be venerated and incorporated anew into my mental landscape; but most are surprises

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old