Hi Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
Last weekend, I spent 48 hours in Italy attending a friend’s wedding. My best friends from high school were all there. It was probably the first time we got together in ten years. We reminisced about the past while sipping espressos at the beach bar, explored the old town of Gaeta on the back of old Vespas and promised we wouldn’t let another decade go by without gathering.
Those 48 hours were a good reminder that a sliver of our time holds the most cherished memories.
Until next time,
Florian
A Refuge for the Mind
"Brother Matthew locked the gate behind me, and I was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom." Thomas Merton
Picture your perfect thinking spot - a place for contemplation, creativity or simply listening to the murmurs of your mind. What does it look like?
I’d never asked myself that question. Until I found the answer on the banks of the Hudson River.
I can’t pinpoint what sparked my desire to visit. But on a scorching hot afternoon of late August, I took my son on a pilgrimage across New York’s subway system from Downtown Brooklyn all the way up to Washington Heights.
After a steep climb, we made it to the Met Cloisters. Despite opening its doors in May 1938, the building was entirely designed like a 12th-century European monastery. It now hosts a collection of Medieval art.
But I wasn’t here for the tapestries, the Byzantine ivory or the dramatic paintings. I came here for the gardens.
The moment I stepped into the Cuxa garden, I felt like I had just come out of an intense Yoga session, calm and present in my now tensionless body. It felt natural to lower the sound of my voice. Everyone around me seemed to have stopped their conversation short. People walked around slowly undecided about where to focus their gaze like children discovering a new playground for the first time. I could have stayed there all day. And I would have if it wasn't for my son’s attempts to pick all the meticulously planted species of medieval flowers.
What made this place so instantly tantalizing?
Three features stood out, and they all turned out to be rooted in a paradox.
The first thing that struck me was the location. A garden nestled in the heart of a building is typical of monastic architecture. Cloister gardens enabled monks to enjoy nature without having to leave the monastery. But it is not something we are familiar with. Gardens are usually in the back of a house. The paradox of a space surrounded by walls but with the sky as a roof made me feel like I’d stepped out of the world altogether. I was only a few stops from Time Square but the rumbles of the subway trains and non-stop honking were replaced by the church-like silence that few places manage to command.
The layout was equally unusual. You don’t just step out of the monastery and into the garden. Cloister gardens are surrounded by a covered passageway that provided monks with shelter from sun and rain. This creates a transitional space where you are neither completely outside nor completely inside. I felt drawn to sit on the edge of the passageway under the arches. From there, I soaked in the wilderness of the outside garden and the craftsmanship of the pink marble columns all at once. Perhaps this is what makes sitting by a riverbank, standing by the window of an airport terminal or lounging on a rooftop terrace feel so soothing. Edges between spaces different in form and function seem to act as triggers for meditation.
Lastly, the medieval species of flowers, apple trees and thick grass in the center of the cloister felt at once unruly and carefully tended, at arm's reach and yet inaccessible. Unlike a public park where we treat nature as furniture - you can picnic on the grass or use a tree for shade - in a cloister it is subtly fenced off from foot traffic. The walkway that cuts across the garden lets you peer over the flowers but a concrete garden edging keeps people from the temptation of crossing over. A bit like those steel cables in museums reminding you that you’ve stepped a bit too close to the painting. This separation grants nature an almost sacred status, inviting the eye to contemplate it.
Integrating cloister gardens into homes and residential buildings seems impractical. But I can’t help thinking about what we’re missing by not drawing inspiration from such an ingenuous form of architecture. Just like we have libraries for learning, squares for meetings and parks for pretty much everything from exercising to dog-walking, we should have cloister gardens for the times we need to retreat within ourselves.
Weekly Wisdom
📚 Books of the week: Monasteries have been on my mind quite a bit lately. I’ve been wanting to find out more about what it was like to live as a monk. A Time to Keep Silence recounts the experience of British author Patrick Leigh Fermor who visited a number of monastic communities in Europe in the 1950s. I learned a lot about the different “branches” from the Benedictines to the Trappists, their diverging philosophies and the rules that governed their everyday life. For an intimate account of how American Trappist monk Thomas Merton found his vocation, I recommend the Seven Storey Mountain. As a non-religious person, I struggled at times with the references to faith he used throughout but found the author’s insights on the values of modern society fascinating. To understand the principles that guided the life of Christian monastic communities from obedience to humility and work, the Rule of Saint Benedict is pretty much the foundation of it all. For something a little lighter, I’m half-way through How to Live Like a Monk, a guide about what we can learn from medieval monastic practices and how to apply them to everyday life.
Lateral Thought
“We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”
Thomas Merton - The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)
We've been AI before AI was thought of. The conditioning we have bought into has put us all on autopilot.
Florian, I used to live directly across the street from the Cloisters and the Hudson River. Seriously one of my favorite spots in the city! If you're down for a trek that's a little further up I'd recommend coming to my current neck of the woods - Van Cortlandt Park which is on the last stop of the 1 train. Literally can hike for miles without bumping into anyone and sometimes you can see some wild animals like deer or turkeys. The hikes are also doable for little ones, plus there's a huge stable of horses right in the park.