Anglicans closing seven Vancouver Island churches
http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/storyv2/CTVNews/20100309/bc_anglican_church_100309/20100309/?hub=BritishColumbiaHome

Deja vu all over again.

P.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chokh Raj" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2010 5:33 AM
Subject: Re: Dante in the City (was : signs and wonders)


Thanks, Rick, for the link to Eliot's LONDON LETTER of May, 1921. I'd love
to reproduce the whole paragraph here:

*The True Church and the Nineteen Churches*

"While the poetry lovers have been subscribing to purchase for the nation
the Keats house in Hampstead as a museum, the Church of England has
apparently persisted in its design to sell for demolition nineteen religious
edifices in the City of London. Probably few American visitors, and
certainly few natives, ever inspect these disconsolate fanes; but they give
to the business quarter of London a beauty which its hideous banks and
commercial houses have not quite defaced. Some are by Christopher Wren
himself, others by his school; the least precious redeems some vulgar
street, like the plain little church of All Hallows at the end of London
Wall. Some, like St Michael Paternoster Royal, are of great beauty. As the
prosperity of London has increased, the City Churches have fallen into
desuetude; for their destruction the lack of congregation is the
ecclesiastical excuse and the need of money the ecclesiastical reason. The
fact that the erection of these
 churches was apparently paid for out of a public coal tax and their
decoration probably by the parishioners, does not seem to invalidate the
right of the True Church to bring them to the ground. To one who, like the
present writer, passes his days in this City of London (quand'io sentii
chiavar l'uscio di sotto) the loss of these towers, to meet the eye down a
grimy lane, and of these empty naves, to receive the solitary visitor at
noon from the dust and tumult of Lombard Street, will be irreparable and
unforgotten. A small pamphlet issued for the London County Council (Proposed
Demolition of Nineteen City Churches: P. S. King & Son, Ltd., 2-4 Gt. Smith
Street, Westminster, S.W.1, 3s.6d. net) should be enough to persuade of what
I have said." -- TS Eliot

Thanks,
 CR


--- On Mon, 3/15/10, Rickard A. Parker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> > Since Eliot refers to those
> crossing London Bridge with the Dante quote
> > about death having undone so many, do you think the
> implication is that
> > London is a contemporaneous version of hell? The
> speaker's subject
> > position is the same as Dante's after he and Virgil
> pass under the gateway
> > to hell, as you note.
>
> Here is the ending of T.S. Eliot's "London Letter" dated
> May, 1921
> and published in The Dial magazine June, 1921. Note
> how he uses Dante
> to comment on his work in the city.
>
> >
http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/tseliot/works/london-letters/london-letter-1921-06.html#churches
>