The Stained Glass in the Middle of Nowhere
Catching rays of light in a cathedral in Le Vésinet, France
One of my favourite sentences ever appears about a third of the way in The Pale King, an unfinished novel that American writer David Foster Wallace had been working on up until his untimely death in 2008.
It goes like this:
This song is making me feel both warm and safe, as though cocooned like a little boy that’s just been taken out of the bath and wrapped in towels that have been washed so many times they’re incredibly soft, and also at the same time feeling sad; there’s an emptiness at the center of the warmth like the way an empty church or classroom with a lot of windows through which you can only see rain on the street is sad, as though right at the center of this safe, enclosed feeling is the seed of emptiness.
There’s something about this sentence that I find deeply moving. Whether it’s the rich, vivid imagery he uses or his repetition of the word ‘emptiness’, you can’t help but come away with the feeling Wallace seemed intent on conveying: a warm, tragically beautiful form of melancholy.
I sometimes think about this sentence whenever I step into a cathedral and find it empty.
