Apr. 16 - Today is Queen Margrethe’s birthday. I call her Queen Margrethe because that’s still her title, but she’s no longer our actual queen. That would be her daughter-in-law Queen Mary, the wife of Margethe’s son King Frederik. Danes have been celebrating April 16 as “The Queen’s Birthday” for decades, however, and these adjustments take time.
So although festivities weren’t going to be anything like they were in the past—the non-Covid past, in any case—there were still some events planned for the day, and virtually all of them were canceled because one of Copenhagen’s most iconic buildings caught fire early this morning and is still burning as I write this.
The building was being renovated and therefore surrounded by scaffolding. It seems unlikely, from what’s being reported so far, that much of the building will survive.
(Danish coverage is ubiquitous, but here’s some English language coverage from BBC.)
The construction of Børsen was one of the many grand projects carried out during the reign of the profligate Christian IV, Denmark’s own version of France’s Louis XIV. “Børsen” literally means “the Exchange,” and it was commissioned as a business hub in the hopes of establishing Copenhagen as a center of trade. Construction was completed 401 years ago, in 1623, and the building stood proudly in the center of Copenhagen right up until this morning.
There are no reports of any deaths or even injuries, and that’s something to be grateful for, but the loss is being taken hard at every level, from the royal family and government ministers down to workaday Danes like this moronic scrivener. The Copenhagen skyline (such as it is) is going to look to Danes like the New York skyline looked to New Yorkers after 9/11: like someone came and knocked a tooth out.
(Of course, on 9/11 someone actually had come along and deliberately punched those holes in New York, and they killed a few thousand souls in the process. I lived in New York at the time and hope no one will mistake my comparison of the holes in the skylines as a comparison of the events. The loss of Børsen is tragic and sad, but that’s all.)
The cause of the fire is of course being investigated—fires don’t just start themselves—but in the end it will most likely turn out to have been accidental. An act of human negligence: a carelessly tossed cigarette, an overheated power tool being set down beside some flammable materials, an exploding lithium-ion battery.
Someone does something stupid and an historical icon burns to the ground. These things happen.
For me, personally, the most striking images of the day were of the volunteers rushing the priceless art out of the burning building. Shots like this, from TV2:
And this:
They reminded me of an iconic sequence from a very old movie—I thought from the 1951 Miss Julie, but that doesn’t seem to have been it. I scoured the internet and asked GPT4, but the scene I remember so vividly doesn’t seem to exist.
In my possibly misremembered scene, the servants of an aristocratic family are carrying enromous family portraits in gilded frames out of the burning estate in the eerie twilight of a midsummer’s eve. There are two or three servants carrying each framed portrait, struggling under its weight.
Saving what they could they could of the old world that was burning down around them.
It’s a hell of a metaphor. Would have worked for Miss Julie, works for Børsen, and even seems to work for our civilizational moment: saving what we can of the old world burning down around us.
And I know what you’re thinking: you’re thinking, Hey, moron, how about some of that indefatigable optimism you’re always talking about?
But I am!
Because the point I haven’t yet made—and was just about to before you so rudely interrupted me—is that every civilizational moment is one of saving what one can of the old world burning around one. The present is the place where the past dies giving birth to the future.
It’s the yin and yang of the human journey: some want to burn away the old world and build a new one from scratch, others are unwilling to let go of all that inherited treasure and work to save it. The two conflicting impulses, when in balance, enable societies to move forward without losing their bearings. Out of balance, catastrophe: either the “Year Zero” insanity of the French Revolution and Pol Pot, or social sclerosis and atrophy.
There’s nothing metaphorical about the Børsen fire, but it’s the Børsen fire as metaphor that’s engendering all the sorrow across Denmark. The past is always slipping away quietly, receding into the distance, and we’re comfortable with that. Maybe not comfortable, but used to it. We don’t like seeing the past disappear in a sudden inferno blaze. It’s too abrupt. It’s unsettling because the metaphor is too direct, too flagrant.
That’s why the world was shocked by the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in March 2001. Not out of attachment to those particular works of stone, but as a reaction to the metaphor of their abrupt destruction. It’s unnatural to destroy the past, to blow it up. It’s anti-human.
Børsen will be rebuilt, that much has already been established. And it won’t be rebuilt for practical reasons, but emotional ones: it will be rebuilt because Danes want to hold onto their past.
And that’s a sign of civilizational strength that I find heartening.
Besides (former) Queen Margrethe of Denmark, today is also the birthday of Martin Lawrence (1965), Ellen Barkin (1955), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (1947), Dusty Springfield (1939), Bobby Vinton (1935), Edie Adams (1929), Henry Mancini (1924), Peter Ustinov (1921), Charlie Chaplin (1889), Wilbur Wright (1867), and Anatole France (1844).
Give your past an extra hug today.
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