When: last Saturday // Weather: 60s // Real life: drinks with friends
Jacket // similar Tee // similar Jeans // similar Shoes // similar Bag
It was almost exactly a year ago that I went to Paris for the first time! Which means it was also almost exactly a year ago that I laid eyes on Notre Dame for the first time.
Oddly, I had a rather strong emotional reaction to seeing it burn last week. I know a lot of people did – my reaction was only odd because it was me, and I’m not one to have strong emotional reactions to… anything, really. (Borderline sociopath? Maybe, but I promise I won’t murder you. Too messy, and I’m wearing white jeans.)
I started feeling like a horrible person for getting so worked up over an inanimate object when I don’t get worked up about any of the horrible tragedies that actually involve human lives. But then I started thinking about why I cared so much. I’ve loved architecture for as long as I can remember, and I don’t really remember how it started. But I geeked out over Gothic architecture while studying art history in college, and I took that geekiness to a new level in law school when I wrote a paper comparing historical preservation laws, which was published in the Indiana International & Comparative Law Review (#humblebrag).
I pulled out a copy of my article on Monday afternoon and started skimming it, because I honestly hadn’t looked at it in almost 5 years. I set the tone with a Winston Churchill quote: “We shape our buildings; and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
Good stuff, right? Probably the best part of the whole article, really. I won’t bore you with quotes of my own, which are much less inspiring than Churchill, but the crux of the article is this: a city’s built environment helps define its identity, and that identity wouldn’t exist without people. That’s when I realized that caring about Notre Dame is caring about people – the people who designed it, who built it, who maintained it, who worshiped in it, who protested at it, who fought for it, and who just came and stared at it (like me). So when you think about it, there’s a little piece of millions of people that burned in Notre Dame. That’s worth getting worked up over. And the good news is, I’m not a sociopath after all.
Hear, hear, Sarah. And no need to be at all humble with the brag, either.
Well said. Here in PBO we were having flashbacks to the day the historic courthouse burned. Until that day, I didn’t appreciate how much a building could define a community. Thankful for insurance!