Interiors Topics

The redwood forest, the remains of a virgin sequoia forest. The interiors of certain Gothic cathedrals—Strasbourg, for example—replicate man’s smallness and helplessness in his middle zone between hell and heaven, amid the columns of the primeval forests which still covered large areas of Europe when the cathe drals were built. But Europe never had trees like the redwoods, whose life span number over two thousand years. This forest is the idea of forest, a prototype drawn by God; no church columns attain that height, and never does a church’s semi-darkness contrast so sharply with a ray slanting in from above the reach of sight.
—Czeslaw Milosz (b. 1911)