St. Paul's Cathedral, London

June 2004

A peculiar empty heaviness hung in the great cathedral, as if the very air was behind glass. As I moved slowly across the black and white tiled floor of the nave, the immenseness of the building bore down. It seemed to stretch on to infinity, despite the fact that I could plainly see the farthest reach of walls and ceiling. I felt, suddenly, very aware of my own movements and of a certain all-pervading chill. Everything was far away; up on the interior of the dome were murals, not clearly visible; the mosaics in the quire caught the light in their glimmering colours and threw it back at the eyes; it was impossible to look at that much marble and Portland stone and gilt and glass and wrought iron, without wanting to sit down and breathe less rarefied air.

The exterior of St. Paul's Cathedral was once designed to loom over everything in the City of London, and even today, the great dome is an inevitable sight, standing tall over buildings and trees, its curve shaping the skyline from across the river to the South Bank. Several parts of the lower building were covered with protective material and scaffolding, for restoration work. It was no preparation for the interior. Combining the ornate richness of a Baroque palace with the scale of a Gothic cathedral, it is simply overwhelming in its decoration. Strange then, that it felt so empty. Despite the tourists walking about, despite the scaffolding, despite the sounds echoing through, it was empty. Perhaps it was because everything echoed; because we were all like minuscule ants marching dazed in that gargantuan work of art.

But, after all, it is doubtful that Christopher Wren ever wanted the cathedral to seem accessible. It was to be the great cathedral of the great city; it was to replace the already great cathedral that had existed before the Great Fire. Cathedrals are not supposed to make anyone feel at home; they are usually intended to evoke awe and wonder in their magnificence. It is embellishment in combination with form that makes St. Paul's the cathedral, a vast museum in the guise of a church. Vast enough to overawe; embellished enough to exhaust.

I wandered around the main floor very slowly, trying to take all of it in at once, the painting, the stone-carving, the metal work. There was a sculpture that could only be by Henry Moore; there was the Light of the World, a painting we have all seen a thousand times, in all its variations of Christ about to knock on a door, the lamp in his hand lighting up the rest of the picture; there were the beautiful iron and gilt gates into the quire. Past the huge, beautiful pipe organ, I walked into the ambulatory, standing momentarily on one of the huge circular golden gratings in thefloor, looking down into the crypt beneath. There in front of me was a marble statue of a man in a shroud. In a moment, I had a dozen thoughts - flashes of the college library where I had first read John Donne's poetry, of the smiling motherly face of the woman who taught my class to understand what he said and to appreciate it, of J. who loves it, of a hundred lines from so many of his poems. The memory of why he stands there in a shroud brought a wry smile to my lips; he posed for the statue in a shroud, and kept it beside his bed during his last illness, as a reminder of his own mortality. The statue trumphantly survived two falls into the crypt, during the Great Fire and the Blitz, because it has no arms to break off.

Behind the high altar stood the roll of honour for the Americans who gave their lives in World War II. Children thronged the glass case with the great book, looking for their own names and surnames in the light coloured by the stained glass in the windows and the light from the glass chandelier above. Their voices were very far away, even in that relatively confined space.
The three death's heads above the entrance to the crypt made me shiver involuntarily, carved in marble and seeming almost like real skulls.

The crypt itself did not initially bring death to mind. It was uniformly bright and cold, painfully, almost chillingly, male, a military shrine with some other inclusions. The huge stone caskets for Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, one dark, one light, dominated the space, surrounded by memorials to those killed in what seemed like a hundred wars, though the only names I recall are Gallipoli, Korea, the Gulf and Afghanistan. Further down there were statesmen, and I noticed a memorial to Florence Nightingale among them. Those "who made shapely the stones" of St. Paul's were commemorated above the tomb of the architect himself. These memorials held little flavour of the past; they were sealed, safe and sterile, in their own underground tomb, with not even the dignity of dimness. They reminded me of over-shiny tombstones, in over-bright cemetaries, cruelly thrusting forth from the earth, as if to remind those left behind of a painful loss not long ago. Only those memorials and tombs that had come through the Great Fire were blurred with age, time making death distant and therefore beautiful.

It was a relief to leave the crypt and walk out into the grey drizzle. Perhaps if I had climbed up into the viewing galleries in the dome on that day, the air and light and view would have dispelled the disquieting stillness of the interior. But it was almost time for the next service, and we had to leave that for another day.