“I predict that when war-damaged buildings have vanished from Beirut’s scape, some people will begin complaining to psychiatrists that they are apprehending even reconstructed buildings as ruins. While the imagination of disaster for a city such as Los Angeles, which has not already been reduced to ruins, is that of its destruction, exemplarily in an earthquake, for Beirut it is fundamentally that of its revelation when reconstructed as still a ruined city.”

 

Jalal Toufic