5 January 2013

The dark tower


In Dreaming spires: Victorian chimneys Paul Dobraszczyk recalls an observation by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1964):
towers are more than simply structures; rather, they are primal images of verticality that illustrate the verticality of the human being. So, in our dreams we always go up towers (whereas we always go down into a cellar). Towers are images of ascension, the...winding steps inside them leading to dreams of flight or transcendence.
In The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges, the A Bao A Qu (see Introduction, page xix) lurks on the steps of the Tower of Victory in Chitor, from the top of which you can look out over "the loveliest landscape in the world."

No comments: