There among the aisles and chapels it still goes on, the old life, amidst the medieval racket of post cards and sacred crockery, the gabbled cloud of foreign tongues and people peering at dark corners; the old life persists, mostly among the old; the woman leaning to kiss the Virgin's brocaded hem; the murmur of the devout; white candles and the clink of francs in the mission box.
A boy of eighteen knelt before the altar, his face hid in his hands, the muddle of the life outside pursuing him here as well. For gems, the painted glass, and for choirs the figures carved in stone; Chartres stood their sketch of Paradise, the place where, as best it could on earth, time stopped.
It was to be, as an arch gives stone the power of flight, the place where faith would give the clay of flesh its flight, a semblance whose stones would tug the heart towards prayer, build in it the desiring of heaven. I saw the boy again. At the west door, beneath the rose of the Judgment, he met a friend and took him to the font. He put his fingertips in the holy water and with them dripping made the sign of the cross on the body of his friend: touched his forehead first, the flat of his chest, the left shoulder, then the right, and last the slight swell of his belly.
The other in turn, fingers wetted, touched the forehead of his friend, the chest, left shoulder and right shoulder and belly. They turned to go, the bead mark of water on their brows. And when I knelt before the altar, I prayed: abject as any man is in the weight of his faults, scanted of hope, but who had seen at least the image of what he desired: another like himself, whose flesh he might inscribe with the water of blessing.
Reprinted with permission. It's the birthday of the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, better known as Horace , books by this author born in 65 B. His father was a freed slave who farmed in Venusia and then got a well-paying job in Rome, acting as an intermediary at auctions for a cut of the profit.
