The city is a beautiful place. It has a beauty of its own - something that it has undeniably created and that is undeniably unique and new - but sometimes it borrows from other, older worlds. Case in point is this cathedral, St. Mark’s.
This cathedral is in one of the most crowded parts of the city, but it’s built on the edge of a hillside that’s too steep and too unstable for construction. The hillside is too steep and too unstable, in fact, for anything but trees. These trees are mostly bigleaf maples, fast-growing trees that have succeeded the great stands of conifers that gave this city its fortune. Age has given them majesty, if not a claim on the land, and they hang on. They are the ragged remnants of the forests that once covered the land that the city covers now.
Perhaps they await the day when the streets and houses will be cleared away and the day when conifers will finally regroup and reclaim their land. Perhaps they await the day when they will die of old age, or the day when the city will cut them down. Perhaps they await the days in which they will live forever.
In the meantime, they surround the cathedral and isolate it. The cathedral rises from them with the ancient beauty of the lonely castle or the fortress, a Krak des Chevaliers or Newschwanstein Castle for the modern age.
A wider angle, however, would reveal that this forest is surrounded by houses, apartment buildings, freeways, factories, restaurants, towers, and people. This forest is surrounded by a bustling hub designed to keep people safe, wealthy, and happy. Who is left to seek sanctuary inside the church?
I don’t know, but the trees are closer to it than the city.