When in a certain nervous frame of mind, we can't stand the sound of church bells. The ancient timbre of them. Like it's 19865. They strike a chord of ancient panic in us; it's like they're tolling our doom. We expect an ancient black carriage, drawn by two black horses, to approach. It's all very John Donne.
In other moods they make us nostalgic for early childhood, that magical Wordsworthian time before anxiety stuck its fangs in us. They make us think of St. Paul's Church on West King Street in Littlestown, with its cliche steeple and it's programmed bells that played what we now recognize as the opening of AC/DC's "All Night Long." We would walk past that church, and imagine the people worshipping in it, and never once did it occur to us to wish we had a can of kerosene and some oily rags. In short, we were innocent, and the sound of those bells reverberated in some deep place of peace within us. And we still sometimes feel traces of that even today, when our nerves aren't jangling like they're being played by Django Reinhardt.
Other times, like today, they just make us anxious. There's one church on 16th Street that at noon on a Sunday strikes up a sustained chaotic din that seems to be a warning that Confederate troops are entering the city. We can hear it the whole way from our apartment. If we lived within a block of that church, we really would burn it down.
It is unknown who gave the bells to said convent but Mr. Kniffen said that perhaps a small museum or a family could have turned it over to the convent after noting that they were church bells.
Posted by: Garage Equipment | November 11, 2011 at 11:45 PM