I’m sad about the Notre Dame fire. When I heard about it I teared up and my heart hurt a little, and today reading the updates I teared up again. I’m not sure where these tears are coming from. I’m usually pretty stoic about these things and I have no specific love for Notre Dame or even Paris, but here I am with a heavy heart. Maybe middle age is making me sentimental, but I’m knocked down by how fragile everything is. I get sad when an artist dies–David Bowie, Chris Cornell, Scott Walker–but I process it more easily. Humans are short-lived and easily broken, and death strikes every day. But something that solid and old, a building that contains so many lives and deaths and inspired so many fragile humans to make their tiny marks on the world . . . when those anchor points are bent and broken I sometimes take it hard, I guess.
A Catholic friend of mine posted a Douglas Adams quote I appreciated:
“I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide.
“But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question.
“But it’s burnt down?”
“Yes.”
“Twice.”
“Many times.”
“And rebuilt.”
“Of course. It is an important and historic building.”
“With completely new materials.”
“But of course. It was burnt down.”
“So how can it be the same building?”
“It is always the same building.”
I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.”
As always, our sadness marks the passing but our daily demands are always calling us. I’m not a Parisian, and my life goes on largely as normal. I’ve been listening to Throwing Muses and watching the rain as I work on chores and projects.
Throwing Muses isn’t properly a goth band I guess, but they were on the 4AD label that brought us so many goth greats–Bauhaus, Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil–and they’ve always been a personal favorite.
Oddly Cultured 
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