2019年经济学人 巴黎圣母院火灾(1)（在线收听）

Notre Dame

巴黎圣母院

The human spark

人类火花

It is not wrong to care more about a building than about people

比起关心人，更关心建筑本身并没有错

“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”主题开创性系列节目中问道。“我不知道，我还不能用抽象的术语来定义它。但我想当我看到它的时候我能认出它，现在我正在看它。”他转过身来，指向身后高耸的哥特式塔楼和高耸的圣母院。

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.

比起关心人，更关心建筑似乎有违人道主义。圣母院在火中燃烧的场景比造成1000多人遇难的南非洪水引起了更多关注，不难理解这引发内疚。然而，实际上，看到大教堂尖塔倒塌，那种广泛深刻的悲痛正是人性深刻的体现，这是一种二十一世纪的独特方式。

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，不仅经济全球化，文化也走向全球化。人们漫游世界，不仅仅为了寻求工作和安全，也为寻找美好和历史。而熟会生爱。一个建筑，如果你曾在它洒满阳光的台阶上休息，曾一起和爱人在它前面自拍，那么它就会成为你记忆中温暖的一部分，因此成为你的一部分。

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.

这个视觉时代赋予美以新能量，社交媒体将艺术名作变成了巨星。然而，只有少数作品获得了这种地位。正如世界著名演员屈指可数，因此，全球可识别文化标志性艺术作品也很少，主要有：《蒙娜丽莎》、米开朗基罗的《大卫》、泰姬陵、大金字塔，以及巴黎圣母院。灾难也进行了视觉呈现。大火发生后的24小时内，社交媒体上关于燃烧的巴黎圣母院视频点击量近2.5亿次。