(no subject)

[camwyn]

Manhattan architecture does wonders for the mood, sometimes. Even when it's not necessarily the most attractive in the world, or even on the block. There is something insanely breathtaking about the sight of a forty-storey building, simply BECAUSE it is forty stories high... to think that we have done that, we have made that, and it stays up. To imagine being the one who laid the last brick looking around and thinking, "is that it? Are we done?" To realise that such marvels have been made in the lifetimes of individual people, rather than the generations it takes to build a cathedral (I count St. John the UnfinishedDivine as heir to that part of cathedral tradition). How much math must have gone into figuring that building out, how much education, how much thought and planning and effort of mind and body both...

There is more labour and more love, in its own way, in a New York City skyscraper than there is in many a family. I cannot imagine that these things would get built without someone, somewhere, loving what they do. Perhaps not the ones who pay for the building, nor the ones who inhabit it, but what bricklayer would risk his (or her) life three hundred feet above the street if there were another way to earn their daily bread? Even if they cared nothing for the building or the labour, there must have been something in them that said, This is a worthy thing and a cause I must labour in for someone's sake, and that should count for something.