“The symbols don’t light up, do they? Are they forever?

“In today’s dynamic world, where a phone model becomes obsolete after six months, where it is increasingly difficult for people to understand each other, we are losing a sense of constancy and community,” says clinical psychologist Yulia Zakharova. “There are fewer and fewer values ​​that would be unambiguously understood and shared by people.

Centuries-old and millennial cultural and historical monuments, sung by writers, poets, composers, remain such islands of harmony and constancy. We are sad about the fire in Notre Dame Cathedral, not only because it is a beautiful architectural monument that could be lost, but also because it is still important for us, individualists, to be part of something bigger, to seek and find common values. .

This is how they react to yesterday’s tragedy on the Russian-speaking Internet.

Sergey Volkov, teacher of Russian language and literature

“We are little aware of how important permanent things are for our lives. “Everything here will outlive me” is not about the bitterness of loss, but about how it should be. We walk among the eternal scenery of the great cities of the world, and the feeling that people walked here long before us, and then many other people disappeared and that this will continue in the future, balances and insures our consciousness. Our age is short — that’s normal. “I see a solitary oak and I think: the patriarch of the forests will survive my forgotten age, as he survived the age of the fathers” — this is also normal.

But if lightning strikes this huge oak before our eyes and it dies, this is not normal. Not for nature — for us. Because before us opens the abyss of our own death, which is no longer covered by anything. The long age of the oak turned out to be shorter than ours — what then is our life, seen on a different scale? We just walked along the map, where there were two hundred meters in one centimeter, and it seemed to us full of meaning and details — and suddenly we were raised to a height at once, and there were already a hundred kilometers below us in one centimeter. And where is the stitch of our life in this gigantic carpet?

When in a matter of hours such a complex and huge stronghold as Notre Dame, which was for us an understandable and mastered image of eternity, dies, one experiences inexpressible sadness. You remember the deaths of loved ones and again cry tears of futility. The silhouette of Notre Dame — and not only it, of course, but it is somehow special — blocked the gap through which the emptiness now gapes. It gapes so much that you can’t take your eyes off it. We all go there, into this hole. And it looked like we were still alive. Passion Week has begun in France.

Seems like it hasn’t been covered in a long time. It seems that before our eyes the standard meter from the Chamber of Measures and Weights of all mankind, the standard kilogram, the standard minute, is burning and melting — that which ideally kept the value of the unit of beauty unchanged. It held on for a long time, comparable to eternity for us, and then stopped holding on. Right today. Before our eyes. And it seems like forever.

Boris Akunin, writer

“This terrible incident in the end, after the first shock, made some encouraging impression on me. Misfortune did not separate people, but united them — therefore, it is from the category of those that make us stronger.

Firstly, it turned out that cultural and historical monuments of this level are perceived by everyone not as a national, but as a universal value. I am sure that the whole world will raise money for the restoration, beautifully and quickly.

Secondly, the reaction of Facebook users has greatly clarified the truth that in trouble one should not be complex and original, but simple and banal. Empathize, grieve, do not be smart, take care not to be interesting and show off, but about how you can help.

For those who are looking for signs and symbols in everything (I myself am), I propose to regard this “message” as a demonstration of global solidarity and the strength of earthly civilization.”

Tatyana Lazareva, presenter

“It’s just some kind of horror. I cry like I do. Since childhood, at school, there was a symbol. Total symbol. Hope, future, eternity, fortress. At first I did not believe that I would see it sometime. Then I saw it repeatedly, fell in love as my own. Now I can’t hold back my tears. Lord, what have we all done?»

Cecile Pleasure, actress

“I rarely write here about sad and sad things. Here I almost never remember the departure of people from this world, I mourn them offline. But I will write today, because in general I am completely at a loss. I know that people — they die. Pets leave. Cities are changing. But I didn’t think it was about buildings like Notre-Dame. The symbols don’t light up? They are forever. Total confusion. Learned about a new variant of pain today.”

Galina Yuzefovich, literary critic

“On such days, you always think: but you could go then, and then, and even then you could, but you didn’t go — where to hurry, eternity is ahead, if not with us, then with him anyway. We’ll make it. The last time we were in Paris with the children and just too lazy — Saint-Chapelle, Orsay, but, well, okay, enough for the first time, we’ll see from the outside. Carpe diem, quam minime credula postero. I want to quickly hug the whole world — while intact.

Dina Sabitova, writer

“The French are crying. The event is deafening, a feeling of unreality. It would seem that we all from the fact that somewhere was Notre Dame. Many of us still only know him from pictures. But it’s so terrible, as if it’s a personal loss… How could this happen…”

Mikhail Kozyrev, journalist, music critic, presenter

«Sorrow. Only grief. We will remember this day, just like the day the Twin Towers fell…”