A couple springs ago, my mother, sister and I went on vacation to Paris for a week. Besides the usual visits to the Louvre, Musee D'Orsay, and Versailles palace, one of my must-see attractions was the Pere Lachaise cemetery. I wanted to go and see the graves of Oscar Wilde and Moliere, and so my mom and I trekked out there to take a peek.
I remember feeling shivers of ghoulish delight when I saw the movie the "Mummy" and they talked about the "City of the Dead"; Pere Lachaise was literally a city of the dead. It took up about five city blocks, and there was just vault after vault, and grave after grave crammed into that cemetery. The funniest thing though, and my mother pointed it out, was that the vaults and mausoleums looked like little houses (some of them were quite elegant, with windows and fancy doors and even statues) lined along streets where people could walk along or cars could pull up onto. The vaults were houses for the dead, and then this cemetery was transformed into a city of the dead.
This makes me think of the house as a holy, sacred space. The house, as a sanctuary or representation of the world, is a place for the living, but the vault is the house, with the same connotations, for the dead. And just as a city is almost like a microcosm, a collection of homes gathered within boundaries, emulating the idea of the City of God, then a cemetery too emulates this because it is a collection of the houses of the dead. It is the reflection of the world after this world - the opposite of life.
Creepy, huh?
No comments:
Post a Comment