Strasbourg

July 8, 2017. Strasbourg.

    We arrived in Strasbourg in the middle of the day, the sun high in the air. Although starting from the industrial and commercial mess of a train station, every direction was ridiculous with timber-framed, bright-colored, lush-flowered charm. I look back at the first wildly amazed photographs I took and know we were still in the medieval wastelands. Give us ten more blocks.

    And there. Even though we wouldn’t have access to our apartment for a few hours yet (my hand is still aching from dragging the monster duffle on its little wheels across the cobbled streets for four hours), we headed to where we’d be staying--in a secluded plaza with a fountain at its center--in the heart of the old town with pretty much guaranteed world heritage site status. From our apartment, we walked a pedestrian street and stopped to gape at the extraordinary pastries in windows, glazed and iced and layered and arranged, art in miniature, a visual delight I could understand if it was constructed for permanent display rather than as the daily offering these actually were. Meanwhile, the walls of the four, five story buildings on either side of us were intimate, not confining, and in a moment, we would emerge from the alley and encounter the Cathédrale de Notre-Dame, a towering red sandstone, gothic-arched, gargoyle-laced heart-stopper.

    Three more times on this trip would this cathedral give me an experience with the sublime, and that’s four more times than almost everything on Earth.

    We took in the cathedral, backing up to the outer edges of the square so the camera’s eye might fully take in the height of the building, if not the length of it. The square was never big enough to achieve this. Maisie and I wandered (and, hello, suitcase! lugged) alleys and found gorgeous timber-framed houses from centuries past, in an absurd, never-ending charm. I kept asking, What is this place? And another old church. And another cathedral. And there’s the slowly turning river once more, crossed by flowered bridges. Eventually, we rested in a bar for orangina and a local dark beer, watching the tourists file by below the leaded glass windows and flower-boxed doll-house buildings everywhere around us.

    Our apartment was a hothouse and I ended up sleeping on the floor that night, but that’s all I want to say about misery.

    When Maisie and I returned from putting our bags away, we were able to enter the Strasbourg Cathedral, and that was the second moment of sublime astonishment. The air was cold and high, and the stained glass was rich, dark-bright and dramatic in theme and red and blue; and here again is magnificence, a stunning carved plinth and an astronomical clock; and once again, the paradoxical meeting of unimagined ambition and devotion to an experience of deep humility.

    Then we climbed the cathedral’s tower, and climbed and climbed, catching up to panting twenty year olds, and came out to all of red-roofed Strasbourg below us, where I encountered a second moment of the sublime, in the light wind, in Maisie’s absorption, in the beauty of a human world for a moment contained. This probably isn’t true for Maisie, but for myself, I enjoyed the view and the experience more than the clearly anticipated Eiffel Tower.

    Once down, I followed a Lonely Planet app through an interactive map and a GPS that I’ve discovered works without cellular data to a lock in the river and lovely restaurants perched above and what was maybe a fish ladder below several apartment buildings and the pedestrian path cutting through it all, and finally to an islet playground parallel to an islet park, connected by a bridge and four 15th century towers. We were able to take in these towers and the cathedral in the distance from the top of an elevated, covered pedestrian bridge, and I took the same picture I’ve seen in guide books, what’s essentially the Strasbourg cover photo.

    We ate spaghetti bolognese on the way back, the cloud cover disappearing until we discovered half our table under a spotlight of sun, sapping our strength. But also we needed to eat. On this trip, we haven’t starved, but we’ve also averaged only one solid meal a day, one pastry, and one something else. We just haven’t been hungry more than once a day.

    Maisie stayed in the apartment that evening while I went out; but I brought her back for what was looking like an event on the side of the cathedral. People were gathering. Police were posting themselves at what became an entrance and two exits. Music was being tested. And different lights were being rehearsed on the plaza and surrounding walls. Maisie came with me to join in the crowd’s anticipation. It was now ten pm. Was it going to start soon? Maisie didn’t want to stay long. Finally it didn’t start and it didn’t start, and Maisie said it didn’t look like the kind of thing she’d be interested in even if it did start, can we go back. I rushed her through the crowds and back to our place because I knew it would start as soon as I left, and I wanted to miss as little as possible. But I was wrong. There was plenty of time after I returned before anything happened.

    By the time it did, there was an enormous crowd. The bell tolled a great beckoning cry and the town answered. In front of me, a group of young men made a spectacle of themselves, and I guess we needed a spectacle, but one man in particular was paying out in frat bro homoerotic gold, climbing over friends prone on the ground and humping their faces, slapping butts, making loud pronouncements to the almost as loud delight of his friends.

    It began. On the wall of the cathedral appeared tall yellow grasses, waving in a breeze, and birdsong came out of the enormous speakers. We quieted. The grasses waved; birds chirped. Someone pointed nearby and a group of heads swiveled. I didn’t see anything. Grass, birds. Oh my God was Maisie right. Is this like Norway’s slow TV movement, where people will watch a boat sailing for seven days, or a fire blazing for several hours, or a woman knitting? Stage one response: Anticipation. Stage two response: A waft of cigarette smoke surrounded the plaza as many lit up; voices more audible. Stage three response: Some people started to leave; voices became more audible. I started writing this very paragraph in my head, thinking about the stages, and composing--stage four, many people leave; stage five, I don’t know, because I was part of stage four.

    So I got up. People were laughing and making a lot of noise now, swarming the exits. I was halfway there when something changed.

    The birds stopped and the grass disappeared, and they were replaced by swaths of color on the cathedral, and a figure -- it looked like a rounded figurine, like a Matisse shape -- was climbing a ladder that appeared on the tower, climbing and slipping. Exiting people stopped, turned, went back. The figure jumped off the ladder, and seemed to jump from one flying buttress to the next.

    And that was when a feeling started to rise in me. The next scene was rain, starting in drops that seemed to fall from one level to the next, glancing in different directions at the angles of the building. Then the water fell in torrents. Then, once bathed in white, the scene turned to something else. The light and sound show was exquisitely, carefully designed, and for only this one venue. The structure of the building was outlined until it seemed not light at all but simply the building, but then the lights collapsed to the left, and the sanctuary was crushed, and opened up again into something bright and bold. Spotlights trained on the saints and popes on the parapet, and then their shadows appeared on the walls all around us. I was utterly transported. And then the leaded windows were outlined in sharp yellows, and they turned a rich blue inside, yellows and reds, the glory and richness of stained glass. I caught myself gasping. Here was a state of a wonder. Finally, against a techno beat that was more fireworks than finesse, the closing moved from stained glass blues and leaded outlines to the swaths of light bursting and back to lines and panes, and finally, the Matisse figurine, climbing down.