In the summer of 2001, I walked around Paris with my then-best friend, admiring the city's buildings and boulevards. Notre Dame was awe-inspiring, a jewel of gargoyles, flying buttresses, and stained-glass rose windows, the splendid product of generations of labour. It's aching to see their enchanting work in flames. Guy Gavriel Kay tweets, "Why do we grieve for ruins destroyed (by ISIS) or for fires like Notre Dame, sometimes seemingly more than for human deaths? In part because we know we only have decades, each of us, but these things MAY last to say 'We were here and with all the evil we did, we also did this.'"





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