Cathedrals

There's a Despair.com poster that shows a majestic photo of the pyramids of Egypt, with text beneath reading something along the lines of "Never understimate what you can accomplish with planning, will, and an unlimited supply of slave labor.

This kind of captures how I feel about cathedrals in Europe. On the one hand, these took armies of serfs sometimes centuries to build, which represents an immense amount of labor that might have been used to grow food, to construct better sanitation systems, or to improve the standards of living in Europe. To the part of me educated at a mostly-Marxist Californian university, these buildings are collossal monuments to the subjugation of the masses by a handful of wealthy elites.

The other part of me, though, just thinks: 'Damn that's cool.'

We don't really build anything at this kind of scale anymore. Skyscrapers, despite their size, are just office buildings now, and anyway, after 9/11 no one wants to build large ones. The Apollo program was really the last time people came together on a massive scale for the purspoe of building something that would inspire awe, in the way a cathedral does.

I stand in the center, turning in circles, wondering why the panorama feature on my camera only goes up to 360°.