Why the North Tower?
The tower on the left in the 15C painting is the north tower of Notre Dame de Paris.
If you know the Victor Hugo novel Notre Dame de Paris, this is where the young Archdeacon, Claude, has his alchemy laboratory. Claude has been one of my fictional pin-up boys since my mid-teens. I fell in love with him, despite all the mess he gets into and creates for others, because I could recognise a lot of myself as well as a lot of things I found attractive. Looking back, I now realise that he's one of the first, and best-realised, Aspies in literature. I want to give him a hug, a mug of hot chocolate, and 'the talk about girls'. And talk about philosophy, and alchemy, and all the new stuff coming out of Italy via Ficino, and does he know there's a temple of Jupiter under his church, and that this is the heart of the city where the best of Emperors, who read the same authors and was also into theurgy and Neo-Platonism, was crowned with the dragon-bearer's torque and raised up on his men's shields? I want to rove through time and introduce him to Julian (who really is my ideal man: the intellectual and writer who is also a man of action), and get them both wired on coffee in the Tabac de la Sorbonne and buying up most of Vrin's Librairie Philosophique. (With Julian probably getting over-excited at the existence of Greek carry-outs in the Rues Xavier Privas and de la Huchette and foraging for vegetarian souvlaki and spanakopitas…)
Because I am sick of a world that does not value us. Sick of a culture that revels in the inane and tacky and coarse; of the turning of universities into cash-cows revolving around Business Schools, and not communities of scholars; of cultural disenfranchisement (depriving state school kids of the chance to study Latin and Greek) in the name of 'relevance' and a bankrupt post-modernism that pretends there's no qualitative difference between high culture and pop-culture; of the worship of STEM at the expense of the humanities and arts, to churn out technically proficient barbarians; of politicians who privilege geographical accident over cultural/intellectual affinity.
If you know the Victor Hugo novel Notre Dame de Paris, this is where the young Archdeacon, Claude, has his alchemy laboratory. Claude has been one of my fictional pin-up boys since my mid-teens. I fell in love with him, despite all the mess he gets into and creates for others, because I could recognise a lot of myself as well as a lot of things I found attractive. Looking back, I now realise that he's one of the first, and best-realised, Aspies in literature. I want to give him a hug, a mug of hot chocolate, and 'the talk about girls'. And talk about philosophy, and alchemy, and all the new stuff coming out of Italy via Ficino, and does he know there's a temple of Jupiter under his church, and that this is the heart of the city where the best of Emperors, who read the same authors and was also into theurgy and Neo-Platonism, was crowned with the dragon-bearer's torque and raised up on his men's shields? I want to rove through time and introduce him to Julian (who really is my ideal man: the intellectual and writer who is also a man of action), and get them both wired on coffee in the Tabac de la Sorbonne and buying up most of Vrin's Librairie Philosophique. (With Julian probably getting over-excited at the existence of Greek carry-outs in the Rues Xavier Privas and de la Huchette and foraging for vegetarian souvlaki and spanakopitas…)
Because I am sick of a world that does not value us. Sick of a culture that revels in the inane and tacky and coarse; of the turning of universities into cash-cows revolving around Business Schools, and not communities of scholars; of cultural disenfranchisement (depriving state school kids of the chance to study Latin and Greek) in the name of 'relevance' and a bankrupt post-modernism that pretends there's no qualitative difference between high culture and pop-culture; of the worship of STEM at the expense of the humanities and arts, to churn out technically proficient barbarians; of politicians who privilege geographical accident over cultural/intellectual affinity.