I had to laugh when I saw the new photos of the Notre Dame renovation, a long time coming ever since the 2019 fire that almost claimed the immortal gothic relic of a more energetic, imaginative, and transcendent age. LED chandeliers have been installed, obliterating the gloomy majesty of the cathedral in one blasphemous act of wiring.
What we had was an arcane, otherworldly, nebulous reliquary, and what we got was a dentist’s lobby, a mall, a McDonald’s interior. The sterility and unimaginative boorishness of our troglodyte age has now infected one of the West’s most sacred cultural heirloom, a mystical pyramid once inhabited by God, but now fit for nothing more spiritual than the scanning of QR codes under the hideous strobe of dead light.
I suppose it could have been worse. The cathedral could have transformed into something far worse, and we should be grateful that it wasn’t. The structure remains more or less the same, but the soul has been removed. This is no longer a sanctum for the dwindling numbers of pilgrims seeking something more than a smartphone-saturated reality.
It’s been the common assumption that the fire was an act of arson, committed by one of the many newcomers to Paris, who, in a fit of animal hatred, attempted to destroy a foundational Western megalith, just as so many other Christian churches have been set on fire throughout Europe. Where this animal failed, our own percolating neo-primitive culture seems to have succeeded, albeit partially.
