Think towers – Trump Tower, Eiffel Tower, Tower of London, Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Towers are our lookouts and our landmarks, the architectural expression of perspective – and perspective’s exactly what Bill Henderson needed when he decided to build one. He’d hit his midlife crisis and found himself faithless and suffering vertigo.
Henderson says he built his for no reason, but a tower did make a kind of subterranean sense. Towers form a first line of defense – as in the fire towers in the American wilderness or the watchtowers built along China’s Great Wall – and a last stand, as in Ireland’s Round Towers which kept safe the written treasures of Western Civilization.
A tower is a kind of cure for a faithless man, too – the Muslim call to prayer comes from the minaret, the church bells from the steeple, even the Tower of Babel stands for man’s overreaching desire to reach God.
What Henderson found in fighting his fear of heights is that hard work can heal. Invoking a higher tower in the first hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Bill Henderson author of “Tower: Faith, Vertigo, and Amateur Construction.”