One hot summer evening, 33 years ago, I walked upstairs in our family home in California to see flames five-storeys high surrounding me on every side.
But when I walked up the silent road next morning to see what was left, I found bronze statues reduced to ash. My parents’ cars were hollow skeletons. All 60 years of their photos, mementoes, lecture notes – gone, as if they’d never existed. A once-in-a-generation conflagration had overturned my family’s lives in an evening.
to see Lahaina’s famous banyan tree, which had protected the historic town for 150 years, charred and ashen. It was harrowing to think of the little boat that took my wife and me out from Lahaina Harbour so we could hear whale song as the mighty creatures breached a few feet from the prow. As summer draws to an end, many of us are surely wondering what placesWe’ve all grown accustomed, in this age of extreme weather, to reminders of fragility.
Flames rise from Paris's Notre-Dame Cathedral on April 15, 2019, after renovation work ignited the centuries-old church.Besides, I’ve long believed that cultures – and people – are more resilient than we imagine, and that places don’t change every time their features do. Lhasa, in central Tibet, may be packed with karaoke parlours and high-rises now, but the Jokhang Temple at its heart may move the visitor more than ever, in part because of everything that threatens to destroy it.