“The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.”

— Sinclair Lewis , book Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 1, First sentence

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Sinclair Lewis 136

American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright 1885–1951

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Introduction
The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962])

“We do not see and estimate the relative importance of objects so easily and clearly from the level or the waving land as from the elevation of a lone peak, towering above the plain; for each looks through his own mist.”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. II : The Fellow-Craft, p. 44
Context: Refined society requires greater minuteness of regulation; and the steps of all advancing States are more and more to be picked among the old rubbish and the new materials. The difficulty lies in discovering the right path through the chaos of confusion. The adjustment of mutual rights and wrongs is also more difficult in democracies. We do not see and estimate the relative importance of objects so easily and clearly from the level or the waving land as from the elevation of a lone peak, towering above the plain; for each looks through his own mist.

“For him no silver cressets shed their light,
No eager joy-bells sounded through the night
From city minster, or from village tower;
No loud "hurrahs," sent from deep-chested men,
Lifted the midnight mist from off the glen
In celebration of his natal hour.”

John Stanyan Bigg (1828–1865) British writer

Ode to the Centenary of Burns http://www.gerald-massey.org.uk/massey/dmc_burns_centenary2.htm#7 (1858)

“We rub the darkness from our eyes,
And face our thousand devious secret mornings...
And do not see how the pale mist, slowly ascending,
Shaped by the sun, shines like a white-robed dreamer
Compassionate over our towers bending.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 183

“One of the influences in his design for the tower was the Tower of Babel the sense of building the impossible” that “has something mythic about it. The spaces inside the structure, in between the twisting steel, are “cathedral like”, according to Balmond, while according to Kapoor, the intention is that visitors will engage with the piece as they wind “up and up and in on oneself” on the spiral walkway.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

His views of Arcelormittal Orbit
Anish Kapoor Opens the Door:Modern Artist Creates Monuments that Transcend Space & Time

“The towers themselves must be either round or polygonal. Square towers are sooner shattered by military engines”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter V, Sec. 5
Context: The towers themselves must be either round or polygonal. Square towers are sooner shattered by military engines, for the battering rams pound their angles to pieces but in the case of round towers they can do no harm being engaged as it were in driving wedges to their center.

“At last you're tired of this elderly world
Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating
You're fed up living with antiquity”

Guillaume Apollinaire book Alcools

A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien
Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin
Tu en as assez de vivre dans l'antiquité grecque et romaine
"Zone", line 1; translation from Donald Revell (trans.) Alcools (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1995) p. 3.
Alcools (1912)

“The rules of reason build towers that reach past the treetops. The rules of trust build towers that reach past the stars.”

Mary E. Pearson (1955) young-adult fiction writer

Source: The Heart of Betrayal

“Stone towers appeared early in the Loire River valley. The massive ruin at Langeais, recently dated 992, was once a broad tower with four corner turrets. Today it stands in the park of a fifteenth-century chateau. Not far off, at Loches, the tower is the earliest surviving great tower to combine within its walls a hall, the lord’s chamber, and a chapel. Recent analysis of the wood used in the original building has dated this tower between 1012 and 1035.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Source: Medieval castles (2005), Ch. 1 : The Great Tower : Norman and Early Plantagenet Castles

“The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.”

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Sinclair Lewis 136

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