Unsuspecting Souls. Barry Sanders
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to human behavior. Such language conflates architecture, building, posture, and growing up, as if there were no inherent stability and solidity to the idea of education itself, and it needed to borrow the vocabulary of the most seriously engineered activity—architecture.
In the nineteenth century, as buildings rose higher and higher, architecture more and more appeared to defy gravity. Just at the end of the century, America erected the first skyscrapers in concrete, made possible by a contemporary British invention, around 1824, cement, which gave the requisite strength to concrete so that buildings could reach far into the sky. People could mimic those buildings—standing tall and powerfully straight by gaining bulk and mass and, above all, strength. Many people achieved such stature through weight training, what devotees today call “pumping iron.”
An American naturopath named Bernarr MacFadden developed a weight-training program during this period, employing a regimen of both nutrition and exercise for a population that he saw in desperate need of strength and solidity. Aiming his program at both the body and the mind—at physical as well as moral well-being—MacFadden redefined for the common person the idea of the normal. He took the metaphor of the body as edifice quite literally, and called his new movement, in an odd locution, as if everyone served as his or her own biological engineer, bodybuilding. His magazine, Physical Culture, carried the slogan “Weakness Is a Sin.” MacFadden made the normal person synonymous with the strong person. In times of moral and psychic uncertainty like the nineteenth century, as well as ours, it appears, people need to keep up their strength. To do otherwise, for MacFadden, was to deviate from a path of absolute righteousness. As everyone else began to disappear, he gave his disciples a way to solidly stand their ground. He offered them a way to attain substance and strength. He fortified them—with words and with nutritional supplements.
Nineteenth-century architecture made the idea of solidity starkly visible. It is hard to argue with a building’s presence. America, in particular, reached its architectural apogee in one particularly amazing structure. John A. Roebling, a structural engineer, completed the first successful suspension across any appreciable span—1,595 feet—in 1883, with the Brooklyn Bridge. The so-called stiffened suspension bridge—hovering high above the earth, levitating in midair—seemed to be fashioned out of solid metal, but poised in a powerful hypnotic trance. Seen from the side, it could even pass for a bony x-ray of a bridge. The suspension bridge, an image of architecture turned inside out—suspended, dependent—held aloft by . . . what? A few steel cables? Cement piers? Perhaps only faith.
If Gothic architecture characterizes the High Middle Ages, the suspension bridge characterizes the late nineteenth century. The master mason of medieval Britain, the architect, gave way to a new magus of the Industrial Revolution, the structural engineer. The suspension bridge shows itself off in underlying, basic elements—in tensile strength, coefficients of expansion, braided steel cables, the calculus. But what makes Roebling’s bridge defy gravity lies in his refinement of a seventeenth-century invention for the building of cathedrals—the cantilever—or as a nineteenth-century book on bridge building more accurately refers to it, “the flying lever.”18 The architectural exuberance of the Brooklyn Bridge hangs in space as a monument to the underlying philosophy of the period—the drive to uncover the essential in virtually everything in the natural world, and in the created world, as well.
But there was another world, too. The bridge also served as a potent symbol for the idea of crossing—in particular, the idea of crossing over to the other side. To find the secret of life, some explorers ventured to that other world where the dead were thought to congregate, and brought back news of eternal life. Séances provided them a bridge. As we shall see, the nineteenth century found other such bridges—out-of-body travel, trances, hypnotic states, and so on. In this sense, we can count all bridges as suspension bridges—suspended between the land of the living and the land of . . . well, no one knew for sure.
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