Of art and ruins

On Sunday I was writing about the great fire in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose that destroys the monastery and its labyrinthine library, reducing uncounted irreplaceable manuscripts to ash, and on Monday I was writing about the remarkable human ability, as illustrated in Colson Whitehead's Zone One, to rearrange the scattered debris of disaster to create art out of ruins, but then I heard that Notre-Dame Cathedral was burning and I thought we already have enough ruins--no need to make more.

Creating art from ruins inspires hope, but hardly enough to assuage the waves of grief that roll in when art is transformed into ruins.