Monet's Cathedral

I remember as a little girl being very confused about Monet's cathedral. I have a vague memory of looking at a book with these pictures of the Cathedral, wondering why this book repeated the same picture in different colors. There must be some mistake, I thought; the idea of misprints already present due to my father's monologues on Saturday afternoon book browsing excursions. I decided against telling the hostess that she had a bad book as I knew she had chosen it to entertain me while she and my father spoke.

I would later become similarly confused about haystacks, though the haystacks I think resolved the distress because they were sufficiently dissimilar. The thought seems to have occurred to me that the artist chose to keep painting these haystacks, and from different angles, though why haystacks my mind could not explain. Haystacks were itchy and those paintings still make me slightly uncomfortable as if I am sitting on a stack in the hillside, observing the folk company my father has chosen to chat with as a part of his anti-communist diplomatic countryside tours of Eastern Europe, waiting until I am permitted to run around with the gypsy children, only later to eat the meat grilling, smoke curling into the cool evening air.

We would visit many small churches on these weekend tours and they looked much alike to me, my religious discomfort already growing, righteous when I was almost seven and realized that I would never again intone the words "I am not worthy to gather up the crumbs beneath thy table" in a country where there were so many hungry people of whom I was painfully aware, where this sentiment riled because it represented an authoritarian attitude that I resented, already believing myself fully capable of determining my own best interests. The churches are misty in my mind, their fogginess fading into forgetfulness. Only last year when I saw a 14th century church in England did I understand why my father and his friends might have had interest, besides religious, in visiting these ancient testimonies of belief. More than belief, these small, local, stone or wood structures engrave marriages, births, baptisms, many of the actual events of life that culminate but continue to be remembered in death, into the communal memory, representing a faith in the acts of this life, as much as the word of the next.

Monet's cathedral paintings were not misprinted. I doubt that it was frustration on his part that he could not paint it just so. As André Aciman's essay "Remanence" suggests about his own Saint-Urban in New York City, visiting becomes re-visiting in order to experience the same as different, but same as well. It is not necessarily about what you see, but how you see it that grows with you into overlapping memories of what you see, so that I smile when I see images of the Cathedral in Rouen because I still see the same picture in different colors, even as sections of the Flaubert story are included, or wonder how the Huysman book might change it, or what it might be like one day to stand in front of it myself, to see it in full sunlight and then come back again, and then again later.