Sometimes it feels as if the whole world is crumbling around us. But the world has never really been as stable as we like to think, and in an existence that is constantly in flux, we can take comfort in the fact that while great loss is sometimes inevitable, great new wonders and opportunities likewise surround us.
Photo: Thierry Mallet/AP
On Monday, at the outset of the Christian Holy Week, Notre Dame Cathedral burned. Pitiless flames consumed and collapsed large portions of what is not only a Parisian cornerstone, but a globally admired monument, a cathedral that is not only a Christian shrine but a testament to human feats of engineering and artistry, and a steadfast witness to 850 years of European history.
The shocking, simultaneously sudden and slow-burning destruction of Notre Dame wrenched tears from the devout and the non-religious alike the world over. That venerable cathedral. The architecture, the artwork, the relics, the treasures, the bodies buried there, the history… Would we lose it all? Thankfully much was saved, but a painful amount was still lost.
And Notre Dame is not the only agonizing loss in recent times.
The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan left a physical hole.
Photo: pursche/123RF.com
Some of our most heartbreaking losses have been wrought by ourselves. Think of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, dynamited beyond repair by the Taliban in 2001. Or the numerous places of worship, ancient artifacts, and other irreplaceable patrimonial gems destroyed by ISIS in the relatively few years since they came into existence, including Mosul Museum and the beautiful city of Palmyra, a World Heritage site. And then there was that lone asshole who turned his truck off the road for the hell of it, just so he could see what it felt like to cut a swathe right through Peru’s 2000-year-old Nazca lines.
Photo: Getty/Reuters
For other losses we have no one to blame or direct anger against, they are merely tragic accidents. Take California’s beloved Tunnel Tree, felled not by a logger but a plain old storm in 2017. Or the National Museum of Brazil, destroyed in a 2018 fire with a loss of South American patrimony, estimated at around 90% of the museum’s contents, that several at the time described as being akin to the store of knowledge lost in the library at Alexandria.
Image: dripline.net
And it’s not only things that we have been losing lately, but also ways of life that are intimately tied to our feelings of safety and stability, and at times to our sense of self.
Take Venezuela, for instance, or Turkey. Thriving, dynamic, “normal” places that have descended seemingly overnight into chaos and insecurity.
A Venezuelan shopkeeper and his shop, before and after the crisis.
Photo: u/Pyr0technician / Reddit
US Steel manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania, shuttered several decades ago.
Photo: Getty Images / Andrew Lichtenstein
In America, both the right and the left lament that the contexts they used to be able to count on are disappearing. And in some very real senses, they are. There are specific manufacturing jobs that will never return, for one, and there are certain gender, racial, and other social norms that are inexorably shifting. While most are happy to see the latter tossed into the dustbin of history, others undeniably benefitted from them. These people will have to adjust to a relative loss of privilege and comfort that, however fair and correct, confounds the expectations they were raised with. Similarly, most Americans will admit that there has been a serious erosion in the baseline of respect and civility toward others that characterized the everyday lives of many for decades (although only to varying degrees, sometimes significantly imperfect, depending on the particular community you lived in), and that our fractured trust in one another will take a long time, likely generationally so, to reestablish.
And if you’ve been watching the mind-bogglingly beautifully shot Attenborough-narrated One Planet on Netflix, you’ll be keenly aware of losses that even the brightest of scientific minds can already do nothing to reverse. We may be able to save some of what remains, but we have already, irrevocably, lost so much of the rich life and easy equilibrium that once characterized our planet.
The sun is setting on a large portion of the world’s living things.
Still image: Our Planet / Netflix / Silverback Films
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But punctuating the darkness of what is past and cannot, or only with great difficulty, be brought back, there are also new and numerous sources of light.
Notre Dame burned. But within a day, nearly a billion euros were raised to rebuild it and pledges of assistance came pouring in from all over the world, including from adversaries. City-dwellers who under normal circumstances would likely never share more than a passing glance, if that, with one other as they go about their day were gathering, communing, and lifting their voices in heartfelt song together. Notre Dame will be erected again, literally stronger than before, and the people of the church and the city will be bonded together through a sense of shared purpose and renewed pride.
Destroyed monuments and artifacts are unfixable and irreplaceable. But advances in archeological detection capabilities (for instance the already highly successful use of aerial laser scans) and preservation technologies (such as high-resolution 3D scanning of both objects and spaces, allowing for more widespread and low-impact study, or the application of material sciences to slow or stop the deterioration of artwork and all manner of historical objects), boosted by more modern, nuanced, and inclusive methods of analysis, together with new understandings of how to share these wonders with more of the world’s people more quickly, more clearly, and more compellingly, means that a greater and more diverse portion of the population has better access to old, new, and yet-to-be-revealed discoveries than ever before, and that we will have a better chance of finding, saving, and sharing things going forward.
Ways of life go by the wayside—industries disappear, governments crumble, alliances realign, and hardship brings out the worst in some. But in countries all over the world there is also great reason to hope. People are more connected, and while that brings certain dangers, it also means that we’re more informed and more engaged than ever before, and that lessons learned in one context can be studied, adapted, and transferred to new settings much more quickly than ever before. We are already in the process of building more inclusive and just societies, and while transitions are painful, they are also opportunities for improvement.
And as for the continued vibrancy and viability of our planet and all those on it, with the exception of some vocal and unfortunately still powerful voices, the vast majority of the globe has finally woken up to the need to take the problem seriously, and private sector and governmental entities all over the world and at all levels are turning that conviction into action. Money and minds are being put enthusiastically to the task (by way of example, when China refused to take any more American trash for recycling and there was momentary panic as to what would happen, it took mere weeks for new and better solutions to shift into high gear right at home). And in fact it was in Paris itself, the site of this week’s tragedy, that the entire world came together in fractious but ultimately joyous unity to acknowledge their interconnectedness and to mutually pledge their commitment to one another and to the small blue rock that’s keeping us all alive.
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Notre Dame will rise again from literal ashes. In the meantime, the world will continue to turn ashes to ashes, and dust to dust. It must. For turning the soil ensures new growth. And yes, that means we will continue from time to time to lose wonderful, important, irreplaceable things. But we will also continue to gain new wonderful, important, and irreplaceable things.
For this particular atheist, herein lies the true “world without end. Amen.”
Mount St. Helens as described by Jim Hill, eyewitness to the 1980 explosion, in Margaret Haberman’s “Rebirth of Mount St. Helens” for American Profile:
"I grieved for a long time. I was trying to absorb how the places I'd been had changed that quick. Experts were saying that it would never come back. I was still in love with the way it was. I still am. But over time, that gave way to re-falling in love with the way it's coming back. In many ways, it's more exciting."
Photo: Jim Hill