On Paris and Boston

8:37pm, Tuesday April 16, 2019

Around 3pm yesterday, Patriots Day, my wife appeared in my home office crying. The Notre-Dame in Paris was on fire, she said. I launched the BBC live feed and saw it happen in real time. The entire structure, mostly ancient stone, seemed to be ablaze. The Notre-Dame spire, as iconic a landmark to Parisians as the Eiffel Tower, was thoroughly engulfed in flame. Smoke of an alien yellow-gray color churned from it. What little that could be seen of the spire’s skeleton appeared charred and frail.

A second later it collapsed. It buckled slightly, then toppled, the hell-fire still burning as it went down. It was staggering to watch. A sensation like a hot rock instantly formed in my stomach. Immediately I flashed back to September 11, 2001.

That day, from the 24th floor of 60 State Street in downtown Boston, I watched the World Trade Center towers collapse. With a dozen or so co-workers in a large conference room, I saw it happen live on a 10-foot projection screen. The massive iconic structures, now on fire, filled my field of vision. They imploded before our eyes, impossibly, implausibly. From the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse across the harbor of the dormant Logan Airport. Later we learned that’s where the planes had come from.

It was all coming back to me watching the Notre-Dame cathedral burn. A few years prior to September 11th, I had done some consulting work in the Wall Street area. Now on this 10-foot screen I watched fire, dust, and burning debris rain down on the streets below. I knew those streets, if only as places to get lunch. That day I hoped no one was on the street beneath those towers in New York. And yesterday I hoped, in a way almost like prayer, there were no French, no tourists beneath the spire.

Last September, I visited Paris for the first time on vacation. Right away I knew why people fell in love with the city. Every street was the most beautiful street I had ever seen. Each building the most magnificent. Each meal, each glass of wine, each wedge of cheese was the best thing I had ever tasted. The soul of Paris got into my bloodstream. And yesterday the heart of Paris was an inferno.

All this, of course, was happening during the Boston Marathon. Six years ago, we lived through our own heart-wrenching catastrophe. We witnessed our streets on fire, bloodied. People at Dana-Farber and other hospitals around Boston helped treat the wounded and the dying. Yesterday as Paris burned, it was impossible to keep the Marathon bombing out of my mind. I remembered where I was when I learned it had happened, how it felt, wanting to do something to strike back and feeling powerless to do so.

No one died in Paris yesterday. Objectively these are different scales of human catastrophe. I get that. I would not argue the point and say they are the same.

But to the French, to an entire nation, this beautiful ancient place is a part of them. The destruction feels like a death. That particular notion seems reflected in the footage of Parisians crying and singing hymns along the streets near Notre-Dame last night. It seems reflected in how millions of euros have already been donated to rebuild Notre-Dame while the embers are still hot. And most poignantly, it seems reflected in the firefighters who rushed into a flaming building minutes from collapse to save what was most precious to them.

It’s difficult, I think, for us as Americans to fully grasp it. The Notre-Dame of Paris is 850 years old. Can you think of anything else that old that you see every day? It took 200 years to build it. As a country, we are barely older than that. As a culture we are still infants in many ways. We have no sense of feeling interwoven with a long-lived heritage the way the French must feel it, deep in their marrow.

I cannot claim to write truly about the French psyche after just one short vacation in Paris (if there are any French people at DFCI, please feel free to add to the discussion). Mostly I’m just attempting to work through the visceral gut punch of the Notre-Dame fire and these disjointed memories playing in my mind. Like every writer, with the vague hope that I’m not the only one.
Maybe what really connects these events in Paris and Boston is the sense of our collective identity being threatened, wounded, burning. Our Boston-ness, their French-ness. Maybe the Notre-Dame is like Fenway Park to us. We walk by it every day, sometimes taking for granted that it’s even there. But if Fenway was on fire and the Green Monster burned to the ground, we might feel like France did yesterday. I hope that never happens.

Vive le France, vive le Boston, much love to both.