When Did We Stop Aspiring to Eternity?
The Notre Dame fire reminds us that we once aspired to build something greater than ourselves
“It is like losing a member of one’s own,” said one disconsolate onlooker at the burning of Notre Dame cathedral. It did feel like that — an intimate shock and wound — but it was also worse, in a way, because it was the death of something larger than a human life, something meant to outlast us, compared to which one person is paltry and transient.
Notre Dame is one of those wonders you learn about in childhood encyclopedias, that you comfortably regard as a permanent fixture of the world, like the Colosseum or the Empire State Building, the Great Coral Reef or Mount Everest. But at sufficiently high temperatures, anything can burn. And the temperature is rising. The ruins of Rome are testament to the fact that great empires and high civilizations can die, and we’ve seen skyscrapers fall. The coral reefs are already dying, and the snows are retreating even from the roof of the world.
The understanding of our own smallness and insignificance, which at first comes as an unwelcome disillusionment, eventually becomes a kind of comfort. We all learn, one way or another, to live with the inevitability of our individual deaths, to believe, through faith or art or our children, that…
