Tower Journal III

Tower Journal is a series of diary entries from a middle-aged architect, living in a tower; his life’s work is the construction of the Great City.

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Friday, evening

Good heavens, finally a chance to write! The week got away from me; day after day, sketching blueprints and making plans; all through my head run figures and sizes, dimensions, specifications, my mind is a labyrinth of the great work; my mind is the City itself, as it should be, as it will be by my will and its own. I embody it such that it may become embodied.

I owe this musing to the week’s efforts (and perhaps the second glass of brandy has loosened my words—all the better I say!). The past few days have been an exercise in intense concentration, near-meditation, if I’m allowed to say; savage focus on my work, the work of the City. My mind is rife with it, and so allow me to release this psychic energy into the pen, onto the paper.

Where do I begin on the City? The next of our world’s wonders, perhaps even a cosmic wonder. The City, beacon of humanity. Brilliant gold and alloy shining in the sun, scattered amber glowing at dusk, and sparkling gems in the dead of the night. A city mountains could call home, whose aqueducts cast their gaze upon rivers with wise paternal knowing, whose radiant spires greet the moon and stars, asking: “Are you not tired, old fellows?”. The City is, in one word inadequate as the rest, a marvel. A marvel by man, rightfully taken from cosmic disorder; then forged, through grit and sheer force of will, into a veritable stamp of architecture and engineering; of finesse and complexity approaching—succeeding—the freely-granted chaos of its birth. The City is a macrocosmic structure; and I, in deep humility, an architect of its grandeur.

Do not mistake this exaltation as a form of egotism, a celebration of what is my own. It is not my will that shapes the causeways, twists the towers, and burrows the waterways. No, it is the City itself, manifesting through we who put it in effect. The City’s physical manifestation is a joint work: of man, his hands and machines, and the City in its purest essence. This essence that pervades the minds of the architects, the engineers; it’s light suffused through the hands of the common builder, him through which it realises the substance of its physical reality. The true City exists in the realm of the super-cosmic, its manifestation just one isntant of an unattainable essence; and yet how splendid, how marvelous even a faltering, incomplete part of the whole can be! We aspire to the essence and are doomed to fail, but how blissful a failure; how noble a task, to dedicate oneself to such a failure: perpetual falling short of truth.

This is what it means to architect the City. So, you see, there is little room for anything else in one’s mind. Though, to continue this way indefinitely is not a privilege granted to the human body; I must eat, rest, breathe. In these brief but damnably necessary periods I write, and so here we are.