A Cathedral Singer

MP3 Audio CD. A Cathedral Singer

I

Slowly on Morningside Heights rises the Cathedral of St. John the
Divine: standing on a high rock under the Northern sky above the long
wash of the untroubled sea, above the wash of the troubled waves of men.

It has fit neighbors. Across the street to the north looms the
many-towered gray-walled Hospital of St. Luke--cathedral of our ruins,
of our sufferings and our dust, near the cathedral of our souls.

Across the block to the south is situated a shed-like two-story building
with dormer-windows and a crumpled three-sided roof, the studios of the
National Academy of Design; and under that low brittle skylight youth
toils over the shapes and colors of the visible vanishing paradise of
the earth in the shadow of the cathedral which promises an unseen, an
eternal one.

At the rear of the cathedral, across the roadway, stands a low stone
wall. Just over the wall the earth sinks like a precipice to a green
valley bottom far below. Out here is a rugged slope of rock and verdure
and forest growth which brings into the city an ancient presence,
nature--nature, the Elysian Fields of the art school, the potter's field
of the hospital, the harvest field of the church.

This strip of nature fronts the dawn and is called Morningside Park.
Past the foot of it a thoroughfare stretches northward and southward,
level and wide and smooth. Over this thoroughfare the two opposite-moving
streams of the city's traffic and travel rush headlong. Beyond the
thoroughfare an embankment of houses shoves its mass before the eyes,
and beyond the embankment the city spreads out over flats where human
beings are as thick as river reeds.

Thus within small compass humanity is here: the cathedral, the hospital,
the art school, and a strip of nature, and a broad hi