I visited Salisbury Cathedral recently, while teaching in London for a year, and found that the ghosts were gone. At the close of the twentieth century, the beauty of the cathedral's architecture seems oddly isolated, as alien in its knightless bare splendor, as luminous and untenanted, as one of those ghostless geometrical houses of glass of the late modernists.

To be sure, the building still reigns calmly over a great square of grass, its harmonic élan unmatched as an example of the revolutionary genius of English Gothic design. The cathedral spire, added in 1305, still aims its long slim cone at sun, clouds and stars in unrivaled majesty. Inside, one remains amazed at the delicacy of the bunches of stone stalks that support the braceshaped arches— stalks once inventions in this place of worship— that soar, deep under the spire, toward an inscrutable heaven. If you stand away from the vast building, off toward Old Sarum, as Turner did when he painted it in 1828, you feel a quick joy. It is a totally modern joy. It has little to do with the past. It claps together curiosity, skepticism, enthusiasm and a sense of divorce from earlier times and events. It is a leashless joy in an instant of triumph of the human spirit, an instant that lingers and is potent now, and only now.

You are constantly reminded of the present here, and not the past, because Salisbury Cathedral seems cleansed of its past. A violent process of destruction and restoration has pushed into every nook and cranny for three hundred years. It intensified after the Second World War. In the seventeenth century, the medieval paintings that glamorized the now gray walls were simply whitewashed. The paintings represented clerical barbarism. In the eighteenth century, the stained- glass windows were extracted. They lacked modernity. In the nineteenth century, new stained- glass windows were installed. Their newness is quite indisputable. In the twentieth century, within the past 40 years, even the whitewash was rinsed off. The paintings that lay under it vanished too.