260822: Tower & Bridge
Tower and Bridge appear to be the two most common structural metaphors in modernist literature. Crane, of course, wrote about both.
Several poets live in towers: Robinson Jeffers and Yeats, who both put the tower (and specifically, a tower near a body of water) at the very center of their poetic cosmologies. Jung spent time in Zurich, working on a Bollingen tower. All three construction projects occur at the same time: 1922. Likewise, Joyce opens 1922's Ulysses with a Martello Tower, and makes the obelisk-shaped Wellington Monument a phallic sign in Finnegans Wake. I've explored the symbolism of the tower in greater depth in a March 2026 talk.
Joyce stages several major events, in his fiction, on Dublin bridges. Crane, after finishing his panegyric long poem The Bridge, attempts to write a Mexican long poem, Broken Tower, before committing suicide early in the project. Bridges appear in Eliot's Waste Land, and the Eiffel Tower opens Apollinaire's "Zone."
These symbols are relevant to this blog's project insofar as they are both key symbols of structure. A crumbling tower is a visual metaphor for precisely the kind of systems breakdowns Charles Taylor describes in The Secular Age. A bridge is a visual metaphor for the cosmic complexification re-enchantments of Teilhard de Chardin.
I think 21st C liberalism is pro-bridge and anti-tower. I think this position has broad merit, and also that towers are probably underrated, and that bridges are difficult to properly build: there are a lot of nuances vis-a-vis how traffic & crossings regulated than is sometimes assumed.