Victor Hugo on Historic Preservation

I am re-reading the fabulous novel Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. If you have never read it, I highly recommend it. It has changed the way I think about things. But be sure you get the full version. You can actually download a free version from the Gutenberg Project. It's a pretty good translation.

At any rate, one of the passages I read caught my attention. This is what it says:

The author of this book, who regrets the necessity of mentioning himself, has been absent from Paris for many years. Paris has been transformed since he quitted it. A new city has arisen, which is, after a fashion,unknown to him. There is no need for him to say that he loves Paris: Paris is his mind's natal city. In consequence of demolitions and reconstructions, the Paris of his youth, that Paris which he bore away religiously in his memory, is now a Paris of days gone by. He must be permitted to speak of that Paris as though it still existed. It is possible that when the author conducts his readers to a spot and says, "In such a street there stands such and such a house," neither street nor house will any longer exist in that locality. Readers may verify the facts if they care to take the trouble. For his own part, he is unacquainted with the new Paris, and he writes with the old Paris before his eyes in an illusion which is precious to him. It is a delight to him to dream that there still lingers behind him something of that which he beheld when he was in his own country, and that all has not vanished. So long as you go and come in your native land, you imagine that those streets area matter of indifference to you; that those windows, those roofs, and those doors are nothing to you; that those walls are strangers to you; that those trees are merely the first encountered haphazard; that those houses, which you do not enter, are useless to you; that the pavements which you tread are merely stones. Later on, when you are no longer there, you perceive that the streets are dear to you; that you miss those roofs, those doors; and that those walls are necessary to you, those trees are well beloved by you; that you entered those houses which you never entered, every day, and that you have left a part of your heart, of your blood, of your soul, in those pavements. All those places which you no longer behold, which you may never behold again, perchance, and whose memory you have cherished, take on a melancholy charm, recur to your mind with the melancholy of an apparition, make the holy land visible to you, and are, so to speak, the very form of France, and you love them; and you call them up as they are, as they were, and you persist in this, and you will submit to no change: for you are attached to the figure of your fatherland as to the face of your mother.

Such beautiful words are rarely said now.

What he is speaking about, of course, is the massive urban reconstruction that Paris is constantly undergoing. Perhaps we may think that Paris needs some reconstruction... To be honest, we all feel nostalgic about our home lands, the cities of our youth, any place we have come to know well.

In the United States, we have difficulty appreciating things of historic value. Yet none of us functions in a vacuum. We are all products of every experience we have had, good and bad. We judge things against this experience, enabling us to determine what is good, what is bad, etc. and we make decisions based on these judgements. The desire to preserve some facet of our past history needs to grow within us so that we can learn from the past and use that knowledge to inform our future. Don't destroy so easily that which has become a part of the shared experience that acts as an anchor to our lives.