Today, you are a member of… (Y)Our Monolith
On Saturday May 24th, the Brooklyn Bridge marks its 125th anniversary of going public. Overbuilt, stone-solid, and superfine, the Brooklyn Bridge is a landmark of steel-suspension engineering and a transportation route for thousands of people in cars, riding bikes, and on foot. Take a trip across it and you can see the Statue of Liberty, the Verrazano Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, the Manhattan skyline and Brooklyn’s hardworking bulk. But more than a practical civic structure or a grand tourist attraction, the Roebling effort stands as a monolith to a mostly unconscious hominid faith in atoms to act in such a way so as to deliver us from one side of something, up and over the insurmountable, to a solid landing on the other side with the standing offer to take us back again if we want. This week while New York City celebrates its boldest bridge, give the monolith in your own brain some props. Take a walk across your very own Pon Sublicius, that which is both buried deep in, and suspends you well over, the grimy waters of your unconscious. While there, enjoy the view, yell Huzzuh! and shoot off some fireworks – for what are we members without monoliths? Just Australopithecii without punctuated equilibrium.
