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Notre Dame
巴黎圣母院
The human spark
人類火花
It is not wrong to care more about a building than about people
比起關心人，更關心建筑本身并沒有錯
“What is civilisation?” asked Kenneth Clark 50 years ago in the seminal BBC series on the subject. “I don’t know, and I can’t define it in abstract terms, yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it, and I’m looking at it now.” And he turned to gesture behind him, at the soaring Gothic towers and flying buttresses of Notre Dame.
“文明是什么?” 50年前，肯尼斯•克拉克在BBC“文明”主題開創性系列節目中問道?！拔也恢?，我還不能用抽象的術語來定義它。但我想當我看到它的時候我能認出它，現在我正在看它?！彼D過身來，指向身后高聳的哥特式塔樓和高聳的圣母院。
It seems inhuman to care more about a building than about people. That the sight of Notre Dame going up in flames has attracted so much more attention than floods in southern Africa which killed over 1,000 arouses understandable feelings of guilt. Yet the widespread, intense grief at the sight of the cathedral’s collapsing steeple is in fact profoundly human—and in a particularly 21st-century way.
比起關心人，更關心建筑似乎有違人道主義。圣母院在火中燃燒的場景比造成1000多人遇難的南非洪水引起了更多關注，不難理解這引發內疚。然而，實際上，看到大教堂尖塔倒塌，那種廣泛深刻的悲痛正是人性深刻的體現，這是一種二十一世紀的獨特方式。
It is not just the economy that is global today, it is culture too. People wander the world in search not just of jobs and security but also of beauty and history. Familiarity breeds affection. A building on whose sunny steps you have rested, in front of which you have taken a selfie with your loved one, becomes a warm part of your memories and thus of yourself.
如今，不僅經濟全球化，文化也走向全球化。人們漫游世界，不僅僅為了尋求工作和安全，也為尋找美好和歷史。而熟會生愛。一個建筑，如果你曾在它灑滿陽光的臺階上休息，曾一起和愛人在它前面自拍，那么它就會成為你記憶中溫暖的一部分，因此成為你的一部分。
This visual age has endowed beauty with new power, and social media have turned great works of art into superstars. Only a few, though, have achieved this status. Just as there is only ever a handful of world-famous actors, so the pantheon of globally recognisable cultural symbols is tiny: the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David, the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramid— and Notre Dame. Disaster, too, is visual. In the 24 hours after the fire started videos on social media of the burning cathedral were viewed nearly a quarter of a billion times.
這個視覺時代賦予美以新能量，社交媒體將藝術名作變成了巨星。然而，只有少數作品獲得了這種地位。正如世界著名演員屈指可數，因此，全球可識別文化標志性藝術作品也很少，主要有：《蒙娜麗莎》、米開朗基羅的《大衛》、泰姬陵、大金字塔，以及巴黎圣母院。災難也進行了視覺呈現。大火發生后的24小時內，社交媒體上關于燃燒的巴黎圣母院視頻點擊量近2.5億次。
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