As I write this, Notre Dame is on fire. I’m not going to show photos of the blaze. It feels like looking at a crime, looking at a corpse. I should be grading right now – sorry students – but I can’t focus on anything except this loss. So I’m going to write, because right now I can write or ugly cry and that’s about it.
Have you been to Notre Dame? I hope you have. It’s a truly, literally *awesome* building. I’m not Catholic, and not particularly religious, but being inside Notre Dame, I think you have to be heartless not to feel some spiritual connection. I’ve been to Notre Dame many, many times over the years, and it has never failed to make my heart pound.
In the last decade, I’ve had the incredible honor to teach in Paris, and showing students around the cathedral has been a particular joy. I love the whole process of it: standing in line on the parvis. Slowly getting closer to the bas relief sculptures around the entrance. Having students spot St. Denis, and then highlighting the gigantic hinges on the doors.
But once inside, I never lecture. Instead, I let students discover the space in their own way. And I do the same. Every time, I want to walk the aisle and the ambulatory by myself, and then sit in the nave, look up at the ceiling, and just marvel. Marvel that a building can stand over 850 years. Marvel at the beauty of it. Marvel at the sense of history, continuity, of *belonging* that I feel, even though I’m not Catholic and I don’t even live in France anymore.
After the students all have their time in Notre Dame, we meet up in the park behind it and talk about all the fun architectural bits: the gargoyles, the flying buttresses, the pointed arches, the quatrefoils. But the time inside isn’t for that. The time inside is for communing with the building, with history, with humanity, and for some, with God.
This devastation is also a call to arms. I hope that it inspires rather than discourages preservationists. I hope that those who are otherwise unconvinced by preservation can viscerally feel the importance of this loss, and perhaps start thinking about the built environment as an asset that is worth protecting.
This is a huge loss. An unspeakable loss. But it must be rebuilt, so that in 100, 500, 850 years, people can keep marveling at what humanity can do.