Chile 2012: A Promenade Through Plaza de Armas

January 15, 2012

A lazy mid-summer Sunday afternoon in the Plaza de Armas, Santiago, Chile.

There’s a universal feel to great public spaces like the Plaza de Armas. I’ll bet if you were to have Scotty beam you down to public squares in Rome, Paris, Stockholm, Boston, and other capitals, you’d see nearly the same scene on an afternoon such as this.

People relaxing on sunlit benches or patches of shade, kids feeding pigeons, tourists with maps in hand, vendors pedaling anything that might tempt the passersby and even a group of ardent Evangelists. The people-watching is spectacular, an unending spool of human interest stories in motion or at rest.

  

 

 

The architecture surrounding the square is renowned for its examples of colonial construction including the Palacio de la Real Audiencia (now the Museo Historico), the Correo Central (post office) and the Catedral Metropolitana.

A moment after pushing through the giant doors of the cathedral I am stunned. Auditory static vanishes. I’m engulfed in an ocean of deep silence so abrupt I regress to split second pre-conscious memory of comfortably floating in amniotic fluid.

Every bit of sound inside seems to be sucked into the cavernous space soaring up to the mile-high arched ceiling overhead. Daylight is filtered through stained glass windows. Pencil thin shafts of sunshine poke through dainty round skylights.

The relative silence is so overwhelming that it takes time to register that the silence is not total. I begin to distinguish hushed voices of visitors, occasional uninhibited cries of infants, and echoes of shoes on marble floors. Last to penetrate my range of hearing is the Gregorian chant piped in at nearly subsonic levels, astonishingly refreshing, rooting me in an oasis of tranquility.

My autonomous nervous system is recalibrating. My body downshifts. I am aware of my breathing, the places where I am holding stress, and the level of stimulation I’ve left behind.

We are dwarfed by the scale of the cathedral and the provenance of religion that still clings to it. But this is not a pilgrimage. Some have come to sit and relax, some to sightsee, some to pray. It’s hard not to feel tiny and mortal in the prodigiously huge edifice.

The shock of exiting the cathedral is intense. The jabber and clamor outside startles me as much as the silence on the way inside. It is hard to believe that the world we live in is filled with so much sight and sound, chaos that we take as normal.

Re-establishing reality...commerce and connecting with a local family.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Comments

[Bambi Good]

thanks.... reminds me of the Zocalo and the Cathedral towering over it in Oaxaca where I visited during winter vacation (still mostly on the school calendar as I work for Steps to Success at night).... What a life you have created, Paul. I hope you stay well for a very long time, Bambi

[Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. aka pt at large]

As you can tell, entering the cathedral was like entering a fourth dimension, not a specific religious experience, but an amazingly abrupt change from the world outside...which i hope to continue experiencing for a long time!

[Cathleen Cavanaugh]

Thank you so much for these wonderful stories about your adventures in Chile. I absolutely love reading them, and I'm learning so much. And reading about a warm weather location is a bonus.

[Carolyn Liesy]

Wow, brilliant description of the silence, the sounds, and your response.