London is a commemorative city. With such a rich history, I love how the city exists as a collection of monuments; honoring, referencing and paying tribute to the past. What has most impressed me on my first day here is its cleanliness and the effort of its people to respect and maintain its charm. London has offered such a pleasant nostalgia, from walking to Bedford Square to taking the bus to St. Paul’s Cathedral. As I expected, St. Paul’s floored me. To experience St. Paul’s Cathedral is to experience a feat of human creation. St. Paul’s provides us with a truly marvelous epitome of what is the monumental. But what is monumental?
Personally, cathedrals always have their way of humbling me. Walking into this space, the presence of my own body within this space becomes visceral; the day to day subconscious awareness of my body immediately becomes starkly conscious. The vastness of its size tangibly minimizes me. Its breadth shrinks me as its otherworldly presence of the human ability to create dumbfounds me. It becomes a world and not a room. I become a piece and not a whole. I realize my tiny part of humanity. I can’t help but to imagine this space as a moment of convergence of all the slices of time; the hundreds of years of reverence, devotion and worship.
For me, that is the definition of monumentality. Not just its large size or its ability to commemorate a time, people or place. It’s monumentality exists within its ability to transcend time and space for its contemporary viewer. St. Paul’s is rich for its powerful ability to stir within visitors a wondrous moment of humble self-reflection.
It is in this moment that I am reminded of Julie Andrews. Random, yes, but her famous tune “Feed the Birds” in Mary Poppins famously incorporated St. Paul’s into pop culture. In this song, she sings to the Banks children about the Bird Woman who sells bird feed-“feed the birds, tuppence a bag.” Not only is this a beautiful song that captures the essence of the cathedral, with its whimsical references to the sculptures of the saints and the steps, but it represents a monumentality of the outside space. The steps of one of the most famous and revered monuments in London can house a beggar woman. I love this example of humanity’s relationship with the cathedral.
*But beware, the feeding of the birds is prohibited