A sacred place: The meaning of Notre-Dame
PHILIPPE WOJAZER/ReutersIn the subway Monday evening – I’m on my way to dine with friends – we’re told the train won’t be stopping at Cité station because of a fire. When I emerge from underground just before 8, my phone beeps with a text from my son – “Notre-Dame is burning” – and I start to tremble. Checking Le Monde on line, I learn the spire has collapsed. When my friends open the door, I fall into their arms – need to be held.
Though a non-believer and indeed fairly averse to organized religion, I regularly enter churches, mosques and temples all over the world, valuing them as places set aside for sacredness, quietness, celebration, meditation, prayer, music. We’re all creatures of symbol and story. We all tell ourselves tales about the cities we inhabit, stitch their monuments into our memories and make them part of us, no matter how much or how little we know about their real histories.
But because I’m a writer, because I’m a foreigner, because my specialty is trying to put myself in the places of people who aren’t like me, I try to be attentive to what I’m not seeing, what I’m not being told, what is not being shoved into my face but swept under the carpet. I never forget, for instance, how privileged I am to live near enough to the Seine to be able to walk along its beautiful banks. I happen to be one of the two million Parisians who live in Paris proper.
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