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Impermanence

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Notre Dame Cathedral in Flames 2019

This morning at the L.A. Central Library, I was reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel of sexual obsession entitled The Bad Girl, published in 2006. In it, he discusses a visit to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris years before the 2019 fire that destroyed the cathedral’s roof. This passage made me think that it is dangerous to talk about anything that is man-made as permanent—with the possible exception of the pyramids at Giza in Egypt. Even though the damage has been repaired for now, nothing (in Vargas Llosa’s words) really is guaranteed to “escape the ususry of time.”

I tried to distract her and took her to look at the cathedral, a sight that never failed to overwhelm me even after all the years I had been in Paris. And that night more than at other times. A faint light, with a slightly pink aura. bathed the stones of Notre Dame. The large mass seemed light because of the perfect symmetry of its parts, delicately balanced and sustained so that nothing was disordered or disarranged. History and the sifted light changed the façade with allusions and resonances, images and references. There were many tourists taking pictures. Was this same cathedral the setting for so many centuries of French history, the inspiration for the novel by Victor Hugo that excited me so when I read it as a boy, in Miraflores, in my Aunt Alberta’s house? It was the same one and a different one that had accrued more recent mythologies and events. Extraordinarily beautiful, it transmitted an impression of stability and permanence, of having escaped the usury of time.

The Past Goes Up in Flames

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Frederick Catherwood’s Drawing of Maya Ruins at Chichén Itzá

I wanted to write about the Notre Dame de Paris fire yesterday, but I held back. All I could have said at that point is, “What a horrible shame! I am completely aghast!” It needed me to sleep on he news before I was able to put the event in any perspective.

That perspective, as it comes to me now, is that our past is always and everywhere going up in flames, collapsing under the wrecking ball, or being abandoned and overgrown. The City of Los Angeles, for example,  is under the sway of greedy developers who think nothing of bulldozing our history. Much of the history of motion picture production in Hollywood is gone forever, with just a few isolated buildings such as the Chinese and Egyptian Theaters, the Lasky-DeMille Barn, and the Post 43 American Legion Theater standing out from the architectural Kleenex boxes.

Have you ever heard of the seven wonders of the ancient world? They are (or rather were) as follows:

  • The Lighthouse of Alexandria, Egypt
  • The Colossus of Rhodes
  • The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus
  • The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
  • The Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Greece
  • The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
  • The Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt

How many of these wonders still exist? Only one, the Great Pyramid. All the others were destroyed by natural disasters and other mishaps over the centuries and millennia. All the great cathedrals of Europe are vulnerable to fires, terrorism, floods, and what have you.

Overgrown Maya Ruins at Copán, Honduras

My visits to Maya ruins in Guatemala and Honduras in January brought home to me in the most vivid way the fragility of the past. I keep thinking of Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

How many other cultural landmarks will disappear during our lifetimes? I have visited Notre Dame twice and marveled at the sheer artistry and magnificence of the place. I hope that the French succeed in reconstructing the interior, the roof, and the spire that were destroyed in the conflagration.