All the facile happy talk about the cathedral being “rebuilt” is going to seem a bit tone deaf to most of the people who have ever spent a significant amount of time inside Notre Dame, humbled by the magnificence of the edifice and awed by the level of achievement of a specific group of medieval men. Western civilization has not managed anything of that magnitude in five hundred years; most cultures have never been able to manage anything similar. The reason it gets 12 million visitors a year is that it offered a mostly intact look at a lost civilization, one not centered on plastics, Facebook, and petrochemicals.
At any rate, the damage hasn’t even been assessed and cataloged yet, so, even though it is sure that “something” will be done, using the word “rebuilt” while the fire was still raging, implies a kind of philistinism which would put Notre Dame on the same esthetic level as a garden shed.
Then there’s the problem of the Theseus’ Paradox, which accounts for some measure of the differing reactions, some people being on their knees crying, having had the wind knocked out of them, some people waving it off as a temporary and ultimately insignificant annoyance, then going back to their newspaper and croissant.
According to Greek legend as reported by Plutarch,
“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
—Plutarch, Theseus
The modern version of the Theseus’ Paradox is “George Washington's axe" (sometimes "my grandfather's axe") an apocryphal story of unknown origin in which the famous artifact is "still George Washington's axe" despite having had both its head and handle replaced.
Having spent hours inside Notre Dame on multiple occasions, yesterday was a gutwrenching day for me, and though I know “something” will be done over the coming decades to “rebuild” it, even if it is only the roof which is replaced, the actual loss to humanity is, and will continue to be, incalculable. But, if one’s sensibility says “it’s just a building” then it will count as no great loss, and will be just “the same” in the future, like George Washington’s axe. The things that have been and are lost will never be thought lost to those who have never seen them, or, more accurately, experienced them.
Some will care, some will not. It was ever thus.
