Yes, that was a loaded statement, so bear with me. Notre Dame was and is a monument that encapsulates everything that signifies Western civilization. It was built to project, truth, faith, beauty, art and culture. It's only fitting that it stands in Paris, regarded as the most beautiful city in the West, if not the world. But it was likely built with the understanding that something constructed and furnished with such great care and attention to quality and detail, could be easily lost. To understand civilization is to understand that, as James Howard Kunstler (expect me to quote and paraphrase him liberally here) wrote, life is tragic, everything we love is bound to be lost, and life will go on without our own selves.
Architecture defines a civilization, and the architecture of Notre Dame defines France perfectly. So, alas, does architecture in the United States. While our older buildings - those that have been preserved as opposed to those that were cavalierly destroyed to make way for, say, sports arena that look like giant carburetor filters - define our past, our more recent buildings define our present. And the buildings we've been erecting for the past seven decades mostly define our tawdriness, our disrespect for tradition, and our lack of standards (qualities commonly reflected on the record charts these days). Kunstler wrote in his 1996 book "Home From Nowhere" that Americans defy the reality of life's tragic nature - the essential building block of any civilization - by erecting buildings not worth caring about. Virtually every tract house, highway retail strip, condominium complex, and office building amplifies that apathy. Kunstler explains it this way:
"When a hurricane blows away sixty condo clusters along the Florida Coast, nobody outside Dade County sheds a tear for what is lost, not because other Americans are heartless but because people of even modest intelligence can tell whether places are worth caring about, though perhaps they can't say why. In the heartland, mobile home parks are commonly referred to as 'tornado bait.' Nobody could say that about an Italian hill town and get a laugh, not even an American."
And what are we to make of the recent tornadoes that hit the American Southeast and the Midwest? Many of the houses destroyed were poorly, shoddily built, and it could be easy to shrug off a rural shack in Mississippi or a tract house in Ohio as no big loss. But the news reports remind us that people died in these structures, and it only serves to remind us that no matter how hard we try to deny life's tragic nature, life reminds us of how tragic it can be.
The weather system that affected the Southeast and the Midwest, by the way, produced severe thunderstorms in the Northeast, and one struck the new World Trade Center with lightning, as if to mock the idea of such a building reaching to the sky. It only reminded me of the karma of 9/11 in that, before the Twin Towers were destroyed and before the Pentagon was hit, these buildings were derided for their inhuman gigantism and their banal architecture, yet the U.S. Capitol - one of the most beautiful buildings in the United States - survived 9/11 when passengers on another jet airliner foiled the attempt terrorist mission to destroy that building. Imagine the even greater tragedy that would have unfolded had al-Qaeda succeeded in destroying that temple of democracy.
And Americans do get it, even if they don't know it. Case in point: In 1989, Mead Hall, the 1836 mansion on the campus of Drew University, my alma mater, in Madison, New Jersey, was in the middle of renovations when a fire gutted the building. Students were sad for the mansion . . . while making wisecracks about how it was too bad the fire didn't happen to the University Center, a loathed brick and cinder-block box built in 1958. Mead Hall is still standing, the renovation having been completed in 1992. The University Center was replaced by a new building that, likely, will sooner or later inspire the same derision that its predecessor did. To say that it's nicer than the old building may not be saying much. But that is the difference between buildings worth caring about and buildings not worth caring about. We mourn what is lost when we recognize its value we laugh at the loss of what we know has no value.
And then there is what our unwillingness to deal with tragedy has done to whole places. Our efforts to build a civilization that contradicted reality by replacing real places with perfect, sanitized simulacra of authentic human settlements - namely, cities - only led to the devaluation and destruction of most of our great urban centers. I once mentioned the fall of Detroit, once thought of as the Paris of the Midwest, as well as the current state of Newark, outside which I live. Our clownish efforts to deny life's tragic nature is evident in the fact that, while no one could ever make jokes about a great loss in Paris, Newark, like Detroit, is a punch line. Notre Dame may be gone - temporarily - but Paris is still there. In Newark, the Catholic archdiocese's Sacred Heart Cathedral is still there. It's the city that's gone. When Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders said the same thing about her hometown of Akron, Ohio in one of her songs, she could have been referring to virtually any city in America.
The fire in Paris came at a sadly ironic time - the beginning of Holy Week, which celebrates Christ's martyrdom and resurrection for the redemption of humankind so that the Gates of Heaven could be reopened. The fact that the French plan to rebuild Notre Dame is a testament to their faith not just in the promise of redemption but also their faith in culture and history, two ideas Americans are increasingly divorced from these days. We are increasingly one of the least happy peoples in the West, looking for real connections and real life in our everyday existence but not finding it, except maybe only a simulation of it online or on TV, but our failure or unwillingness to understand the realities of life undermine that. "All our efforts to nullify life's tragic nature have paradoxically led us into deeper unhappiness," Kunstler wrote in 1996. "What we have done to the physical fabric of our country finally is not an illusion but a genuine tragedy. We have come close to making civilized life impossible in the United States."
And we completed the job at the ballot box twenty years after Kunstler wrote this.
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