Notre Dame, feelings after the fire

Notre Dame, feelings after the fire (from a Facebook post of 16 April 2019)

I’ve been doing some thinking about exactly why I and evidently many others found the Notre Dame fire so upsetting. There are of course the obvious things about the beauty and the history of the building and its contents—though much of these seem to have been saved, thanks to the skill and bravery of the firefighters. But, besides this, there are I think (and have often thought before) other, more personal reasons why places can mean so much to many of us, how they connect with our lives and connect our lives with those of others

For me, personally, the Notre Dame connection begins with hearing of and seeing pictures of the place as a child, long before I ever saw it for real. I finally saw it for real the first time I visited France with my partner, Nathalie, in 1998, and was awestruck by it and by the fact that I was so privileged to see it. I saw it several times in the subsequent years, a backdrop to almost annual trips to Paris. I sat on a bench in its shadows in 2013 after I did a job interview (badly) at the Sorbonne, before meeting up for a cheer-up lunch with my friend Allan Potofsky. Since moving to France the following year (after a more successful job interview in Lyon) I’ve taken time to pass by or visit it on almost every one of my fairly frequent trips to Paris, and every time I do it puts me in mind of how blessed I am to have the life I have. And that in fact has become a reason I try to make sure I go there, to feel and remember how blessed I am.

And when there I also think about all the unknown millions of people across the centuries and across the world who’ve also seen Notre Dame, from the carpenters and masons who first built it 800 ago and those who’ve maintained it and rebuilt ever since, those who’ve worshipped there through the centuries, the tourists from all over the world who’ve visited it as I have, to the firefighters who saved so much of it for us all yesterday, and also the people who’ve only heard of it and seen pictures of it, like me until 20-odd years ago. Each one of these people has a unique personal relationship with Notre Dame, the same as me but different from mine. Yet I feel connected to them through this beautiful place, however long ago they lived, however far away they come from, even though I've never met them. These places are where we all connect, what we all have in common, even if we've never met, whenever we lived and wherever we may come from.

I thought maybe all this was slightly fanciful and possibly silly, but this morning I read a short thread by Kirsty Rolfe on twitter—she is @avoiding_bears there and is endlessly brilliant and fascinating. She wrote of a geographer called Doreen Massey (1944-2016) who sees places as constructed by “trajectories”, by the “stories-so-far” that meet in them, and by “intersections” those meetings represent—the connected stories of people, objects, animals, whoever and whatever they may be, and whenever those connections may happen. As Kirsty Rolfe put it: “The trajectories of the oaks felled for the roof: growing for hundreds of years in medieval forests, the largest of their kind - meeting those of the carpenter, of the worshipper, of the tourist, of the mourner.” I’d never heard of Doreen Massey before, but I thought, yes, that’s it, that's how I feel about this place and other places like it. So, I’m going to read some of her work, and I just thought I’d put these thoughts here in case you were wondering about your thoughts and feelings about all this too.

Postscipt—I have, since this, read some of Doreen Massey’s work. The most relevant to this post is For Space (Sage, 2005). A wonderful and moving piece of work.