Notre Dame is on fire

[Starbeard]

So I just walked into my office from teaching my medieval & Renaissance class to this news:

www.france24.com/en/20190415-li ... -cathedral
live feed: www.france24.com/en/live


It just doesn't seem real. Ironically, in class we were talking about the crises of the 14th century and how so many people at the time thought they were literally watching the end of the world. Easy to relate when you see Notre Dame burning.

My chosen silver linings:
1. At least the library is at the Bibliothèque nationale and safe.
2. Maybe this will finally give them the opportunity to restore the cathedral to its premodern state, before the Gothic Revival renovations.
3. France's medieval buildings aren't getting very much love at all, and loads of local monuments and infrastructural achievements are just falling apart or being sold to developers. Hopefully this will be the disaster that finally kickstarts serious restoration funding to preserve the country's medieval heritage.



I guess this should relate to D&D, but I'm sure most people here have invested interest in the topic anyway. But to keep to the forum guidelines:

Anyone here ever been? Have you ever gotten gaming inspiration from visiting a cathedral or other medieval building?

[doublejig2]

Share your sentiment. Though I haven't been fortunate enough to visit one, I feature cathedrals in a realm called, the Kingdom of Pommel. They are the dominant structures in the realm's cities. Excellent resource is Macaulay's Cathedrals (and also his Castle book).

[tetramorph]

Yes, it is very sad.

I was particularly moved by a vid of folks standing and singing hymns together as they watched it burn.

We will see what comes next.

[delta]

I don't travel that much, and I don't take many tourist-type photos when I do, but one of the very few is a picture of me there. Totally heartbreaking today.

[Deleted]

As to the situation in France, I'd rather not make any stupid comments: This is part of the WORLD's heritage. We all lose through these events.

Also, we better pray that this is not some sort of terror attack. Because if it is, we may well start talking about the end of the European Union, right away. - Europe can stomach that the Brits continue with their pitiful spectacle until the voters finally choose to gently lobotomize their governing party; but if France falls to Le Pen - as it almost did during the last election - then things will go bad really quickly. Not going to make this about politics, though, other than I think that we can all agree that self-destructive tendencies, in general, are not smart.


As to the wider topic, how Notre-Dame and similar places ave influenced our own imagination, I'm not quite sure if, right now, this isn't a bit tasteless to discuss:

What I can say is that the reaction I'm seeing of the people in France - not the usual bullnuts virtue-signaling on the web, not what politicians say - helps to restore my faith in humanity, one time after another. And that faith is needed to be able to tell bullnuts stories about dragons and elves every second weekend of the month: The belief that people are not only good in the tales we tell, but also in real life. That "the world is a beautiful place, and worth defending", as Hemingway would perhaps say. That's what I'm thinking of when I have to link a real-world tragedy to somethhing as idle as the games we all play together.

[Starbeard]

I understand your concern Raf. I've wondered the same thing about appropriateness myself. I'll get a little theoretical here, please forgive me:

I think, in the end, these sorts of discussions are not too dissimilar from any number of the more socially vetted ways people deal with tragedy or loss. Raising a toast, having a moment of silence or a group prayer, doing a silly activity in honor of the passed, telling funny stories about the deceased during a wake, all of these acts are in themselves immaterial to the matter at hand and can even be seen by the cynical as little more than flippant self-affirmation; and that can be and probably often is true. But more than just being performative acts to signal our emotions, they are powerful coping mechanisms that allow us to comes to terms with the real importance to us of the thing passed—and maybe, the fact that the act itself is performative is precisely what makes it just such a powerful coping mechanism.

So if we don't allow ourselves that, then I wonder if we aren't actually doing full justice to the thing we are trying to commemorate. After all, gauging responses against established appropriate limits (such as responses that offer real tactile effect, or search for the widest expressions of sympathy) turns itself into a kind of virtue-signalling. (Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that you're doing that here—I'm just pointing out that I understand and am fully onboard with your concern over the appropriateness of your statements, and bumbling my way through the argument that I don't think you need worry that what you've written is tasteless).

I really like your last statement. We could be seeing cynicism and wholly secular responses (not in the sense of secular vs religious, but in its broad sense of being "worldly, of this age, with disregard to timelessness"), but we don't. We could argue until we're blue about whether the cathedral is a symbol of this or that, the collected efforts of humanity or the flagship of fetishized tourism, but in the end we find that to most people, the intrinsic value in the universal symbol is simply because it is a universal symbol, not because the meaning of the symbol is universal. I think your Hemingway quote sums up what we're seeing perfectly.

And of course, through it all we should keep in mind that Notre-Dame isn't actually lost. It's terrible that so much of the original craftsmanship is gone, but the structure is still very much there; the symbol will continue to be a symbol; there's no doubt that it will be restored, and there's no doubt that it will be restored with as much passion, selflessness and scholarship as anything has ever been restored. We can be glad that we live in a world where people are willing to do that.

Anyway, back to the wider topic: if you'd like to express your moderator privileges and stop the topic before it starts, I'm happy to oblige. This is your roof, after all. I just found myself particularly hit hard in a way that I don't think I expected—probably because I never considered the possibility, and I've also been spending several months poring over the early history of Notre-Dame with my students, so the place has really been on my brain lately—and I'd be a liar if I pretended that 90% of everything that goes through my head doesn't get wrapped up in my silly imagination and passion for stupid games. I figured there must be several people here with a similar disposition, but as an online community, traditional acts of remembrance aren't possible; so a thread on monuments inspiring imagination seemed like a fair parallel to holding a wake of sorts.

[Deleted]

Apr 16, 2019 11:15:36 GMT -6 Starbeard said:

I understand your concern Raf. I've wondered the same thing about appropriateness myself. I'll get a little theoretical here, please forgive me:

I think, in the end, these sorts of discussions are not too dissimilar from any number of the more socially vetted ways people deal with tragedy or loss. Raising a toast, having a moment of silence or a group prayer, doing a silly activity in honor of the passed, telling funny stories about the deceased during a wake, all of these acts are in themselves immaterial to the matter at hand and can even be seen by the cynical as little more than flippant self-affirmation; and that can be and probably often is true. But more than just being performative acts to signal our emotions, they are powerful coping mechanisms that allow us to comes to terms with the real importance to us of the thing passed—and maybe, the fact that the act itself is performative is precisely what makes it just such a powerful coping mechanism.

So if we don't allow ourselves that, then I wonder if we aren't actually doing full justice to the thing we are trying to commemorate. After all, gauging responses against established appropriate limits (such as responses that offer real tactile effect, or search for the widest expressions of sympathy) turns itself into a kind of virtue-signalling. (Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that you're doing that here—I'm just pointing out that I understand and am fully onboard with your concern over the appropriateness of your statements, and bumbling my way through the argument that I don't think you need worry that what you've written is tasteless).

I really like your last statement. We could be seeing cynicism and wholly secular responses (not in the sense of secular vs religious, but in its broad sense of being "worldly, of this age, with disregard to timelessness"), but we don't. We could argue until we're blue about whether the cathedral is a symbol of this or that, the collected efforts of humanity or the flagship of fetishized tourism, but in the end we find that to most people, the intrinsic value in the universal symbol is simply because it is a universal symbol, not because the meaning of the symbol is universal. I think your Hemingway quote sums up what we're seeing perfectly.

And of course, through it all we should keep in mind that Notre-Dame isn't actually lost. It's terrible that so much of the original craftsmanship is gone, but the structure is still very much there; the symbol will continue to be a symbol; there's no doubt that it will be restored, and there's no doubt that it will be restored with as much passion, selflessness and scholarship as anything has ever been restored. We can be glad that we live in a world where people are willing to do that.

Anyway, back to the wider topic: if you'd like to express your moderator privileges and stop the topic before it starts, I'm happy to oblige. This is your roof, after all. I just found myself particularly hit hard in a way that I don't think I expected—probably because I never considered the possibility, and I've also been spending several months poring over the early history of Notre-Dame with my students, so the place has really been on my brain lately—and I'd be a liar if I pretended that 90% of everything that goes through my head doesn't get wrapped up in my silly imagination and passion for stupid games. I figured there must be several people here with a similar disposition, but as an online community, traditional acts of remembrance aren't possible; so a thread on monuments inspiring imagination seemed like a fair parallel to holding a wake of sorts.

No worries, mate. - We're all human, and this is not a complicated thing: Something hurts our community - or what we perceive as such - and we feel affected. Mind you that the only time I really lost my nuts online was the day of 2016's Nice truck attack. - We're people, and this happens. IMO, it's good that we talk about these things, rather than not.

[tkdco2]

I watched the spire collapse on live TV. I agree with Rafael about Notre Dame being a world heritage. I was sad all day about this incident. At least most of the artifacts were safely recovered.

[Deleted]

www.techradar.com/news/ubisoft-gives-away-assassins-creed-unity-for-free-so-you-can-see-the-notre-dame

Hell, yeah!

[Porphyre]

Apr 15, 2019 12:45:38 GMT -6 Starbeard said:

2. Maybe this will finally give them the opportunity to restore the cathedral to its premodern state, before the Gothic Revival renovations.

It has become fashionable lately to diss Viollet-le-Duc and his work, especially here in France, but his restauration work is not as extravagant nor historically innacurate as it is painted nowadays. 
True, he added some statues that weren't there at the time, but ther actually was a spire to Notre Dame (it had been disassembled because of its state of disrepair) and he redisgned his own version of the statues of the kings of France, but that's because the former ones had been destroyed during the French Revolution). 
If you look at pictures of the cathedral before the repairs, it doesn't look that différent.

www.paris-unplugged.fr/1840-notre-dame-avant-restauration/
passerelles.bnf.fr/dossier/cathedrale_nd_paris_03.php

[Starbeard]

You're absolutely right, there's a tendency to malign Viollet-le-Duc's renovations as though he just made everything up, which is a gross overstatement. The truth is that the workers did reference sketches and paintings dating back to the 1600s at least, and work based on those images were generally pretty historicist in outlook. The outright additions based on nothing but fancy were mostly reserved for things where the pictorial references were confusing, contradictory or nonexistent, and therefore were of little help—in that case his presentist approach was really nothing more than what happens to every medieval building still in use. No single medieval cathedral or castle is a snapshot of its original construction, it has renovations and additions made from just about every century after.

Most of the "discrepancies" of Viollet-le-Duc's work actually comes in the smaller details of interpretation: for example, the original spire was early 13th-century, but Viollet-le-Duc chose to make his larger, more ornate spire patterned after the late gothic style of the 15th and early 16th centuries. Many smaller spires and tidbits that never had much detail in them were given the same late gothic treatment, to make the whole thing look more uniform. Again, easily overlooked and even admirable when viewed in the context of the time the renovations were made.