PARIS—Following a massive fire that destroyed significant portions of the Catholic cathedral, Paris officials vowed Tuesday to rebuild Notre Dame despite the cosmic absurdity of seeking inherent meaning in the fleeting creations of man. “We will come together as a nation to reconstruct Notre Dame, no matter the fundamental irrationality of imbuing mere man-made structures of stone and wood with any sort of deeper meaning in an existence where entropy is the only universal truth,” said French president Emmanuel Macron in a press conference, adding that the government had already received more than $700 million in pledged funding for a restoration project that will “serve as but a momentary impediment to the corrosive sands of time.” “Notre Dame was built, destroyed, and rebuilt over the course of hundreds of years, and we will rebuild it again, only to watch it decay once more, for indeed that is its fate, as it is the fate of all of man’s works. Like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain, we will endeavor to fix the cathedral despite all empirical evidence to the contrary, in a world which demonstrates time and time again that there is nothing real to be found in worshipping the ersatz edifices that serve as a sorry facsimile of any real human connection. We expect this completely arbitrary and fundamentally meaningless process to take 10 to 15 years.” Taking a drag on a cigarette, Macron added that French officials mourned the Catholic relics and artworks lost or damaged in the blaze, even if they are “but false idols and profane images merely serving to fracture the spiritual connection one ought to devote totally to God.”

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