The Toronto Star: A lesson revealed in the burning of Notre Dame
April 22, 2019
I thought I had all the time in the world.
You tend to do that with monuments as grand and legendary as the Notre Dame Cathedral, which has been a part of the Parisian landscape for more than 850 years.
You forget that it’s a man-made structure built of stone and steel and, instead, attach to it mythical properties that make it virtually indestructible, invincible.
Which is why, when I watched the cathedral go up in smoke on my TV screen at home in Paris, I couldn’t shake a growing, aching sense of loss and regret.
Because over the last nine years, though I’ve passed by the cathedral easily hundreds of times, either navigating my way through dense tourist crowds in a rush to get somewhere or during a Parisian stroll, I’ve only been inside twice.
As the fire engulfed the cathedral with frightening speed, the travel editor in me chided the Paris resident who had become lazy and complacent, and helped her to arrive at a hard and sad truth: the importance of being a tourist in your own city — be it Paris or Toronto, or wherever you live.
