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My father was a French teacher, in middle schools and high schools, and he took me to Paris when I was 11 years old, in 1984. Before that trip, I’d never been more than a few hours’ drive from New York.
We took an overnight flight from J.F.K. Airport and landed the next morning, exhausted. The best treatment for jet lag, my dad explained, was exercise. So after dropping off our luggage at the apartment of a friend of his, we went walking through Paris. I don’t recall any stops on the walk except for our destination: Notre-Dame.
We crossed one of the bridges leading to Île de la Cité, the island where the cathedral sits, and I remember looking up and thinking it was the oldest thing I had ever seen.
The cathedral connects humankind across the centuries. It also connects families, including those, like mine, who will never worship inside of it.
When my grandfather was a young man living in Paris in the 1930s, he walked past it. When my dad was a student there in the 1960s, he lived near it. He took me to see it that day in 1984, as my first experience in a culture other than my own. A couple of years ago, I took my children to gaze up at its towers and its spire.
Like so many others, I feel an almost physical sadness over the destruction of that spire. And I share the instinct of so many others, as well: Notre-Dame must rise again.
More on the fire
“We’ve failed, as a civilization, to be the caretakers of something priceless,” Pamela Druckerman writes in The Times.
“The conflagration brought a feeling of helplessness and foreboding,” CNN’s Frida Ghitis says, “the sense — real or imagined — that we were watching a metaphor, a prelude, a warning.”
As the Paris-based journalist Christine Ockrent notes in The Guardian, the church has been damaged, and rebuilt, before: “Notre-Dame de Paris will survive, and most of its treasures.”
Modern methods — including three-dimensional mapping of much of the cathedral — may be able to help in its reconstruction, as some noted on Twitter. They cited a 2015 National Geographic story by Rachel Hartigan Shea. “The stunningly realistic panoramic photographs are amazingly accurate,” she wrote.
In a time of turmoil for the larger Church, the destruction means something acute for Catholics, writes National Review’s Alexandra DeSanctis. “To many Catholics, it feels as if the Church is on fire in a sense already. And now we are watching it blaze,” she writes.
Notre-Dame was a product of a particular cultural synthesis in Catholic history, my colleague Ross Douthat writes. “The Catholicism of today builds nothing so gorgeous as Notre-Dame in part because it has no 21st-century version of that grand synthesis to offer.”
The Atlantic’s Rachel Donadio — a witness to the fire — and The New Yorker’s Lauren Collins — who visited the roof of the cathedral last month with some of those working to restore it before the fire — have more on Notre-Dame.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/opinion/notre-dame-fire-paris.html
2019-04-16 12:38:47Z
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