For students of English literature, one’s first trip to Europe has probably got to be to the homes of Shakespeare, Austen, and Wordsworth. Mine was. It also included the obligatory castles, palaces and museums. But the one experience that brought an involuntary gasp of awe and tears to the eyes was stepping into the soaring beauty of Salisbury Cathedral.
Tears rose again Monday when I turned on my television and was confronted with Notre-Dame de Paris in flames. The French ambassador to this country expressed the feelings of all those around the world who love the glorious products of the Gothic when he said he felt “a part of myself was burning.”
All such artistic masterpieces are, of course, miracles of survival. They may seem indestructible, but fragility is built into everything human’s devise. The Middle Ages, with their ever-present danse macabre and memento mori, took mutability as a constant theme. Fire almost claimed the greatest repository of knowledge in the ancient world, the Library of Alexandria, but centuries of neglect and periodic vandalism spelled its final dissolution.
Of the seven ancient wonders, only one survives. Reims Cathedral was shelled by German troops in World War I, then accidentally gutted by fire started when the French retook it. Coventry Cathedral was reduced to a ruined shell by German bombers in World War II. Munitions stored in the Parthenon by Ottoman invaders were ignited by fire from Venetian attackers in the 17th century, leaving the ruin we visit today.
War, religious and ethnic vandalism, malice, carelessness, idiocy and time, including floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, have destroyed huge swaths of the cultural legacy of the world. Henry VIII’s attack on the infrastructure of the Catholic Church left England littered with ruined abbeys — Fountains, Tintern, Battle, Rievaulx, Furness and dozens more, with their “bare ruined choirs,” in Shakespeare’s evocative phrase. As the waters rise, the jewel-box city of Venice faces drowning. ISIS defaces Palmyra.
Architectural destruction looms large in the imagination because the ruins are so visible, but think of all the invisible losses. A mere fraction of the written record of the past survives. Much has simply crumbled into dust, but a lot was deliberately destroyed. One reason the Dark Ages were dark was a concerted effort by the ascendant christians to obliterate “pagan” writings. Thus, only one percent of Latin literature has survived. forty-four Greek dramas by four authors are extant, but a thousand or more were probably produced. We know the names of eighty additional authors, but all their works are gone.
Yeats addressed this theme when he spoke of “Old civilizations put to the sword./Then they and their wisdom went to rack…” Only thirty-four Vermeers now exist, though at least six more are known to have been painted. A similar ratio is true of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and their period is comparatively well-documented. The number of missing-in-action masterworks from earlier times is unknown, but likely to be large.
Every catastrophe, like Notre Dame, should send a shiver down our spines. How safe is the Library of Congress and its vast collection? Chartres, York Minster, Compostela, the Duomo in Florence, the Louvre, the Met, the Hermitage, the Prado, the Uffizi, the Shanghai? Are they protected, not just against vandals and thieves, but against wind and water, tremors from below and fire from the sky?
As the hollow shell on the Ile de la Cité now reminds us, in an instant works of genius preserved for centuries can vanish. While we venerate those who make objects of surpassing beauty, we should also praise and value highly the hidden hands of archivists, conservators, and curators, whose work is to preserve our shared heritage. Humans are ephemeral, but what they make has got a chance to last. We should do all we can to prevent their works from sharing our transitory nature.
That may be the most reliable test of a civilization. Though we are clever, adaptable creatures, foresight isn’t always our strongest suit. If we fail to anticipate and prepare for the worst, we will be forced to endure our own guilt and sorrow, and eventually the curses of our children and our children’s children. We can either leave them a legacy of ashes or the treasures of the past that are their birthright. It ought to be an easy choice.