The human spark（to respond with enthusiasm） It is not wrong to care more about a building than about people "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（高高的哥特式塔楼） and flying buttresses（扶壁） of Notre Dame.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 （看到）the cathedral's collapsing steeple（坍塌尖顶） is in fact profoundly human-and in a particularly 21st-century way. It is not just the economy that is global today（今天的经济不仅仅是全球的经济）, 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.
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. the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's David, the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramid（大金字塔）- and Notre Dame. 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.
在火灾开始后的24小时内，燃烧大教堂的社交媒体上的视频被观看了近25亿次。
Yet the emotions /the sight aroused /were less about the building itself than about what losing it might mean. Notre Dame is an expression of humanity at its collective best. Nobody could look up into that vaulted ceiling（拱形天花板） without wondering at the cumulative（accumulative~incremental） genius of the thousands of anonymous craftsmen who, over a century and a half, realised a vision so grand in its structural ambition（如此宏伟的结构野心） and so delicate in its hand-chiselled detail（如此精致的手工雕刻细节）. Its survival through 850 years of political turbulence-through war, revolution and Nazi occupation-binds the present to the past. The fire also binds people to each other. The outpouring of emotion it has brought forth is proof that, despite the dark forces of division now abroad, we are all in it together. When nationalism is a rising threat, shared（common） sadness makes borders suddenly irrelevant. When politics is polarised, a love of culture has the power to unite.
it will be rebuilt. The morning after the fire, the many Parisians who went to the cathedral to mourn its destruction found comfort instead. Although the spire（尖顶） is gone, the towers are still standing and it seems likely that the whole building can be revived. The effort to rebuild it, like the fire, will bring people together. Within 24 hours, 600m Euros ($677m) had been raised from businesses and rich people, and a rash of crowdfunding campaigns（众筹） started.
It will never be the same, but that is as it should be. As Victor Hugo wrote in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", a three-volume love-letter to the cathedral: "Great edifices（construction）, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.
Art is often transformed as it is being made. . . Time is the architect, the nation is the builder."
