What could be said of a world without cathedrals?
There may be tunnel walkways strung between high-rises, insulating the humidity and spreading the joyous commerce fatuously. Plastic bags shuffling through radiated asphalt mixed with sewer steam. There certainly are signs of life, though you can’t see the well-trotted path if it’s cement – maybe by the amount of melted bubblegum wrappers or chemical stains.
The closest place for a contemplation of Eternity would probably be at the intersection or plaza, if a mall, or hopefully a courtyard garden however slim and shoved in. To watch the machinated concrete leviathan, animated through each saunter between coffee shops or bookstores, phone in hand. Where all one’s thoughts converge toward Civilization and its machinated demands, but a blip against the Aether sort of things.
It could seem that a world without cathedrals is being in utero. It’s not only the walkways, but one’s very essence so encased in a land that seems to go forever, traffic jams assured. Sometimes you see beyond the womb through an abandoned gas station in SoDo, or the boarded apartment complex waiting for demolition. Yet waltz in once more into the modern marvel of the grocery store and we’re cradled in this, ultimately, bounded world conception.
With this convenience store stronghold network, maybe it’s enough. However much one could crave something different. However the cathedrals may have been – a town spectacle to break bread in, to humble and position in the grander scheme – for however it was so the bounty was in the way the people carried themselves, their thoughts. Some wonder gathered at the mounting door and harvested in its spacious halls: the beauty is in the mental patronage so imbued, a reverence to blot out all doubts, to be a part of a beautiful orchestration, settling into the marvel of divinity and your fragments therein.
Such bounties are readily available however the concrete spreads. Because you hold the cathedral in your heart. And while one breathes so one may dream another visit and find hearth. To walk as with an echoed hall of a history unknown, make friends of kings. Such a mental cathedral shall instantiate as soon as you commit to it, through whatever you do bother to read, however you do bother to live, interact with. It could instead be a neko cafe, too.
And every word or every sentence read so lays another brick until you are encased in a world invoked, like the one you’re in now. Troublesome indeed, if you let the concrete living slide into cruise control until you’ve fashioned yourself a static prison of efficiency and premature death.
You’re condemned to build: it unfolds even if you throw away the tools. May as well take a serious step toward a preferable aesthetic, matching your buried tastes. Lest you want the concrete paved over and amnesia to follow. Why not overlook the city from your personally crafted perch, gargoyles as company?