Postcard from the Book of Revelation
“It’s like I was in the Book of Revelation,” I said, over the phone.
“Well, you know,” dad replied. “That could be a very good thing or a very bad thing.”
La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is hands down the most astonishing place I have ever visited. The exterior you’ve seen on a postcard, but the interior feels like you’re not supposed to see it yet. I walked in and went silent. The sheer height and the extreme white. The prismatic stained glass. The arches are wings and eyes lie in the vertices. I was confronted with—or had been consumed by—a biblically accurate angel.
The cathedral (as many do) made me feel small. But this one went beyond the physical; I felt spiritually small, like a lit candle witnessing a wild fire. I had difficulty imagining it, though it was right in front of me. A sent seraphim, relaying the wrath of God. It was sublime, the old definition of “awesome”: bewildering beauty mixed with incomprehensible terror.
You walk out the back door, the one with the scribbled secrets of the universe, thinking you can leave. No one ever leaves a place that changes them, not really. Then you walk around, notice the white trunk trees along the boulevards, and realize the cathedral continues. The cathedral is everywhere.
The primary architect, Antoni Gaudí, passed away in 1926—they only finished building it this year. Gaudí designed something so complex that it could only be realized with technology he was a hundred years too early to witness. But he knew the future, somehow, would arrive.
Gaudí made plenty of other fantastic works, although none come close to the cathedral. I mean “fantastic” intentionally; his designs are surreal and flamboyant. He built a few apartments that line the streets—they are impossible to miss.
I did a report on the Palau de la Música Catalana, but we only ever went inside the lobby. In the palace’s concert hall, there is an unbelievably intricate stained glass ceiling. In the middle, the glass bends, dipping down like a raindrop. The architect, Lluis Domenech i Montaner, built the ceiling to fill the room with natural sunlight, and the wooden framework to facilitate the sounds of orchestral music. Montaner himself described it as a “garden of music.” The modernists of Barcelona always had nature in mind.
Hold it. I don’t want anyone to think inspiration is as simple as looking at nature, looking at white trees and turning them into cathedral pillars. Then anybody would do it. The wind won’t lift what is weighed down; only those who let themselves be caught up in it can soar. And that’s easier said than done, so give the people who built Barcelona their flowers. Gaudí had an insane ambition I only aspire to match.
I don’t think they should keep the cranes around Sagrada Familia, but there is something about them in an artistic sense. They seemed emblematic of Catalonian personality. Something distinct, something that desired motion at all times. The city that always keeps on building. The architects and artists, in love with the process more than the result. Barcelona feels like the future. Truthfully, I don’t know if it would be good for Catalonia to separate from Spain, but it feels parallel to Scotland and England. It’s a whole different place, and not for a lack of trying.
I remember taking some time away from the group. My cell service wasn’t working again. So I put it away and walked from the hotel as far as I could in one direction. I saw many things: Graffiti of Dalí on a garage door. Reaching the beach. Dangling my feet off the docks. Looking off into the endless ocean. Some people playing footy. The ball trickling to me. But then I made a pass so bad I couldn’t bring myself to ask them if I could play.
Sometime during the trip, I found myself in a city circle with a thousand pigeons. There were vendors selling bird seed and children letting pigeons crawl across their outstretched arms. Why can’t us writers just appreciate a moment? Beats me. I started to type things into my notes. In secret, I absorbed every image like the two characters I’m yet to write. There, in Barcelona, a book had been revealed to me.