How I React to Famous Things.

I have this freakish obsession with touching famous things (Not people. That's too creepy even for me).  It's not that I'm going to wander up to a Michelangelo and put my hands all over an incredible sculpture - that would be bad for the sculpture after all - but if I'm in a church, or a palace, or a famous building I'll run my hand along a banister or if none of the security guards are watching too closely I'll give one of the columns a brief hug.

It all started with the Hagia Sophia last summer. There's this thing called a wishing column.  It's a brass section of one of the pillars with an a little indent in the center. You place your thumb in the little spot on the pillar and make a wish as you rotate your hand all the way around.  And for me this offered some connection, quite literally, with the building and the other visitors.  The tactile sensation of the place made a great impact on me.  I remember being surprised at how cold the wishing column was despite all the warm human touch that had graced it. I remember thinking that my wish just went up with thousands of others from around the entire world for thousands of years.

Then there was the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, again last summer, where I felt like I needed to hug every column and run my hands over every surface.  There was something so alive about it.  It was constructed with such movement that the building looks like it is vibrating. In touching it I felt maybe I could resonate with it, maybe I could become a piece of the marvelous history that went into it.

This summer, the most prominent experience I've had has been at the Pantheon in Rome. I ran my fingertips along the cold marble on the wall, a dirt red stone in particular.  Perfectly smooth and cold.  I did stop to think that it was probably not the original stone being as it's close to the door and at a height where many might touch it, but it doesn't really matter if it is the original or not. More importantly, it is a part of something great and famed whether it was in the original building or added ten years ago.  Touching it connected me to several thousand years of history.  How many people entered that building in awe? How many of them got in an argument with their spouse? How many of them wondered how it was build?  How many of them wept?

What has become increasingly clear as I've touched each great building is that it's not actually the monument that matters, but the people passing through it that do.  The people passing through these famous places make them increasingly famous as their history is put onto a higher and higher pedestal.   While most monuments are breathtaking in their beauty and grandeur, many more beautiful buildings have fallen in fires, in revolutions, or simply in the passing of time.  It is just that these have survived and have been building reputations upon themselves through the passing of time.  They are important because we have declared them so.

For me the physical contact with them brings them back down off the pedestal. Touching a railing reminds me that it's a real place, not a photo in a history book, not the essence of a Roman god, but a real thing that people go in and out of nearly every day.  This simple act reminds me that it's the people who are incredible and amazing, not the building.