The Neon Cross

[porphyry]

As I’ve mentioned here before, after the phenomenal success of his first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, Verne wrote Paris in the Year 1960. In this the future is presented as a bleak hell where traditional culture has been destroyed by the service of profit and the void left inside of man is filled by a meaningless technology. At the climax of the book the main character, the last student to graduate with a degree in Latin from the University of Paris (where Chinese in the new lingua franca since China is France’s chief trading partner), tries to seek solace for life’s emptiness in Notre Dame, only to find installed on the altar a new crucifix made of electric lights. The sight of this horror, this last insult to tradition, drives him to suicide. Needless to say, the book was never published in Verne’s lifetime.

I was reminded of this yesterday when I heard interviewed on one of the NPR shows a woman who will become the music director of the Baltimore symphony orchestra in the new year. She had just released a recording of her arrangement of the Messiah for a 1940s big band, all the arias and choruses converted into jaunty little jazz tunes. In the interview she happened to say, “I’m the kind of person who thinks there should be a neon cross in a gothic cathedral.”