Thus spoke Winston Churchill in 1941.
And Mark Steyn echoes that in this concluding paragraph in his elegy for Notre Dame.
And yet the next time in Paris I shall visit again those magnificent rose windows and feel something akin to the connection Keats did to the figures on that Greek urn. Civilization is always a paradox: deep roots and yet a thin veneer. To raze Notre Dame to the ground would have been a grand victory for barbarism. If not a "wake-up call", the sight that arises this Tuesday on the Île de la Cité is a kind of pre-Easter resurrection, or at least a reprieve.
We have a reprieve, let us make the best of it.
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