I'm not comparing the two apples to apples. I'm talking about emotional impact of the event.
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History aside, was anything but the building damaged? If the building caught fire but no historical texts or paintings were lost... it can be rebuilt.
Won't someone think of the flying buttresses???
Chill. Western civilization survived the burning of the Library of Alexandria, we'll survive this.
That's the problem. The building is a large part of the artwork. Stained glass and medieval gothic architecture. Many of the old cathedrals like that that are proofed against fire by removing anything out of them that could be a fire hazard. The paintings at St. Peters aren't even paintings, because paint is flammable. They were done painstakingly as mosaics, but from ten feet away, you can't tell the difference.
I still feel like it's not really something that's not replaceable on a materialistic scale. You can recreate pretty much fucking anything and as long as it appears to be the same... nothing was really lost. Y'know, unlike that picture of Jesus that got fucking gutted by that one cunt.
There are a lot of people who value history and its preservation greatly. 1000 years from now, people may only be able to read about and wish they were alive to see Notre Dame the same way we wish it about the Library at Alexandria today. Not to mention, it's an 800 year old bastion of Catholicism that survived a time when the foundations of that were being shaken into a thousand splinter religions. On an emotional level, that is tragic to me very close to on par with how I felt on 9/11.