«"Because it will be beautiful."» Tom Builder in The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
Men have never really accepted the idea of disappearing.
That is why they had children, wrote books, painted portraits, carved names in stone, and erected monuments. The pharaohs built pyramids to bargain with eternity, the Roman emperors left arches where victory could outlive the victors, the European kings sought to perpetuate themselves through lineages, coats of arms, and tombs. Viewed from a certain distance, a considerable part of civilization seems like a long and ingenious argument with death.
But few ways to counteract it are as beautiful as beginning what we know we cannot finish.
For centuries, this was how cathedrals were built. A man could dedicate his life to a tower whose shadow he would never feel. He would carve a stone, place it in its place, and entrust the continuation of the work to the next generation. The stonemasons, the masters, the bishops, and the kings changed. The building grew slowly towards a sky that had far more time than those who tried to reach it.
Building like this required faith. In God, certainly. But, for some, above all, in others.
It was necessary to trust that another hand would hit the nail on the head, that someone would understand the design, that people yet to be born would continue a work begun by someone they would never get to know.
A civilization can also be this: a work that no one starts from the beginning and no one truly manages to finish.
Ken Follett realized that the best way to tell the story of how a cathedral was built wouldn't be to write about stones. It would be to write about people.
When The Pillars of the Earth When it arrived in bookstores in 1989, Follett was known primarily for thrillers. Writing hundreds of pages about a cathedral in medieval England didn't exactly seem like a recipe for captivating readers. Quarries, mortar, arches, vaults, markets, wool, bridges, taxes, monasteries, and ecclesiastical disputes don't, at first glance, seem like subjects that make for pages impossible to put down.
And yet, they are. That's one of Kingsbridge's great feats: Follett manages to make us need to know if a beam will hold the weight.
An arch ceases to be merely architecture. A bridge can determine the prosperity of a city. The quality of a stone can alter a destiny. An engineering problem gains the suspense of an unsolved crime. And Follett does something even more intelligent: he doesn't immediately give us the answers.
Give us time to think.
We understand the problem, we know the limitations, and almost without noticing, we search for the solution alongside the characters. Sometimes we get there before them and feel that slight vanity of someone who believes they could survive a few days in the Middle Ages. At other times, we quickly realize that it would be wise not to leave the 21st century.
We became a sort of clandestine apprentices of Kingsbridge.
And we learned a lot.
Because the cathedral is the first door. History is the way out.
We entered through the rock and, before we knew it, we were strolling through it.
In The Pillars of the Earth, Everything converges on the cathedral: architecture, faith, power, ambition, love, and ingenuity. Then, Follett progressively broadens the horizon. World Without End It leads us to medicine, the Black Death, and the Hundred Years' War. Twilight and Dawn It goes back to the origins of Kingsbridge, to a more brutal world, when what we thought we knew still needed to be born. A Pillar of Fire It tears through the city's borders and takes us to the Europe of religious wars, espionage, and the confrontation between Catholics and Protestants. In The Armor of Light, It even changes the sound of the world: the blows on the stone are succeeded by the noise of machines, of industrialization, of workers' revolts and of the Napoleonic Wars.
We began by looking at a cathedral. When we lifted our eyes from the last pages, we had traveled through centuries.
Paths have changed, but the question remains: what happens when someone looks at the world as it is and imagines it could be better?
In one century, the answer is an arch. In another, a bridge, a different way of treating an illness, a religious idea, a machine, a school, a new organization of work, or a freedom that the previous generation couldn't even conceive of.
On the other side, you almost always find those who prefer immobility, especially when a still world puts them in the right place.
It is this conflict that truly unites Kingsbridge: knowledge versus ignorance, experience versus dogma, freedom versus power, invention versus habit, future versus privilege. Century after century, someone dares to imagine what does not yet exist and discovers that the impossible was often simply what no one had managed to do before.
Follett also achieves something particularly difficult: teaching without seeming to teach. History usually reaches us organized around kings, wars, treaties, epidemics, and revolutions. In Kingsbridge, it is also revealed in the price of bread, in who can cross a bridge, sell at the market, learn to read, own land, or choose whom to marry.
And sometimes, all it takes is a glass.
Throughout my reading, I began to find amusement in a kind of domestic economic indicator. To understand how a family lives, we don't always need to know their assets. We enter their home and see what they drink: water, beer, or wine. An almost insignificant detail can reveal a great deal about poverty, comfort, and status.
This is how the past ceases to be scenery and gains breath.
Because history happens on a grand scale. Life, almost always, happens on a small scale.
There is also a curious familiarity between the protagonists. They are not the same, but we recognize them. They share a kind of intellectual kinship that spans the centuries: builders, merchants, artisans, inventors, curators, women and men unable to accept that "it's always been done this way" is a sufficient argument.
They want to understand, experience, love more freely, or simply reject an injustice that others have learned to consider inevitable. And in doing so, they commit one of the most dangerous sins of any era: asking why.
In their presence, Follett presents villains who rarely bother to hide their condition. Some are cruel with almost professional efficiency. Others transform religion, money, sex, or power into instruments of domination. Few writers manage to make injustice so irritatingly personal.
At certain times, I didn't feel like continuing to read. I wanted to step into the book.
To warn someone. To prevent a decision. To expose a lie. To arrive a few minutes early. Follett masters that particularly perverse form of suspense where we already sense the danger, but the character doesn't yet.
And we speed up our reading with the completely irrational hope that getting to the next page faster might change what has already been written.
Here, too, one of the collection's weaknesses is revealed. After so many centuries in Kingsbridge, I began to recognize the machinery: the ingenious and progressive protagonist, the woman too capable for the space society grants her, the powerful man willing to protect privileges, the threatened love, the authority that confuses self-interest with natural order.
Some villains are too villainous. Some characters think in a surprisingly modern way for their time. Certain coincidences help more than they should.
We see the gears. The problem is that they keep turning.
We anticipated the trap and fell into it again. We sensed the injustice and became indignant once more. We know the mechanism, and it continues to ensnare us.
Few flaws receive such high praise.
Follett also understands what textbooks easily forget: people of the past didn't know they were the past.
They didn't wake up conscious of living in the "Middle Ages," the "Protestant Reformation," or the "Industrial Revolution." They felt hunger, desire, jealousy, and fear. They fell in love, argued, laughed, drank, worked, had sex, had children, and buried those they loved.
Eroticism gives them back their bodies; humor, their lightness; sadness, so often narrated with unexpected delicacy, their fragility. Before they were History, they were simply people trying to live.
And, from time to time, History would enter their home without asking permission.
Only at the end of the collection do we realize that another character has silently appeared throughout all the books.
Time.
Those who for hundreds of pages occupied the absolute center of our world end up reduced to a distant memory. The loved and the hated disappear, the powerful and those crushed by power. What was the present for some becomes the past for those who follow, until only traces remain.
Kingsbridge, however, continues.
And we have acquired a strange privilege: we know that city with memories that its own inhabitants have already lost. We know who walked certain streets, who crossed those bridges, who dreamed of those buildings. We see ghosts where the characters of another century see only stone.
This collection left me with a feeling that no sales statistic can measure.
I never entered a cathedral the same way again.
I continue to gaze at the light from the stained-glass windows, at the apparent absence of pilasters, at a rose window, or at the almost impossible height of a nave. But now my eyes linger on an arch, trying to discern where the weight rests. They follow a column to the vault. They notice a buttress. Behind the beauty, I imagine scaffolding and pulleys, carpenters, blacksmiths, stonemasons, and master builders.
Where I previously saw primarily a monument, I now also discover intelligence, effort, and problems solved.
Ken Follett changed my perspective.
And when I enter a cathedral I don't know, it's mainly two names that come back to me.
Tom Builder and Merthin.
I'm going to miss them…
Separated by about two centuries, I always recognized something of the other in one. Tom looks at a piece of land and sees what is not yet there. Merthin receives a world already built and asks how he could improve it. One has the tenacity of the builder, the other, the restlessness of the inventor. Both observe, calculate, experiment, fail, and start again. More than erecting buildings, they possess the rare ability to imagine possibilities where others see only limits.
And they became strangely familiar.
I often picked up one of these books with the same eagerness as one goes to meet a friend. Not just to find out what would happen next, but to return to that company, to spend a little more time with them, to hear them think, to see them make mistakes, love, lose, invent, and start again. For a few pages, Kingsbridge ceased to be an imagined city and became a place where I knew people.
Tom and Merthin came out on top of everyone else.
I know I will meet them again when I enter another cathedral. Not because they ever walked through those naves, but because they have become part of the way I see them.
Tom will be somewhere between the land and the building, dreaming of what does not yet exist.
Merthin, caught between the building and the future, pondering how to improve it. I'm sure he's also dealing with other, less sacred, urgent matters concerning a tower that has stood for too long, waiting for its rose window.
These two never existed. And yet, I spent so many hours with them that this difference ceased to be so important.
After so many centuries in Kingsbridge, one lesson remains for me: the world has always progressed when someone thought better, questioned the established order, and managed to see further. Intelligent people built, invented, and ultimately guided the future. I look at the present and wonder if we are still sailing on the same current as Kingsbridge. Valter Hugo Mãe seems to have given me an answer in the title of his latest book: The Century of Imbeciles.
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