Adam Greenfield on sacred space, profane time and what counts as sacred, in the American city:
Cathedrals are airports. Like airports, there was at least one in every major city or population center. They were great civic works, huge undertakings of fundraising, resource-management, engineering. Their aisles, landing strips picked out not in high-intensity blue but in flickering candlelight. I don’t want to take the metaphor too far, make it too crushingly literal, but I think now of cathedrals (and mosques, temples, shrines, iglesias and storefront full-gospel churches in the high press of their services) as nodes of a numinous travel network perpendicular to ordinary space and time. In the proper frame of reference, to enter them is to cross a threshold and be taken somewhere else, just as surely as I do when I board a jetliner. That’s what I mean by “sacred.”
So where? Where else? Parks, for the pantheistically-inclined? Movie theaters? Concert halls? Should I be cynical, and say “bars” or even “plastic-surgery clinics”? Where do you go when you want to leave ordinary time behind?