"I was recently walking down the Rue de Rennes toward the boulevard, and I counted how many times I was able to look at the church without being bumped into by a hurrying passerby or nearly run over by a car. I counted seven very short glances, which cost me a bruised left arm because an impatient young man struck me with his elbow. I was allowed an eighth glance when I stopped in front of the church door and lifted my head. But I saw only the facade, in a highly distorted fish-eye perspective. From such fleeting and deformed views my mind had put together some sort of rough representation that has no more in common with that church than Laura does with my drawing of two arrows. The church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés has disappeared and all the churches in towns have disappeared in the same way, like the moon when it enters an eclipse. The cars that fill the streets have narrowed the sidewalks, which are crowded with pedestrians. If they want to look at each other, the see cars in the background; if they want to look at the building across the street, the see cars in the foreground; there isn;t a single angle of view from which cars will not be visible, from the back, in frint, on both sides. Their omnipresent noise corrodes every moment of contemplation like an acid. Cars have made the former beauty of cities invisible. I am not like thoses stupid moralists who are incensed that ten thousand people are killed each year on the highways. At least there are that many fewer drivers. But I protest that cars have led to the eclipse of cethedrals."
M. Kundera - Immortality (p. 243)
