The Architecture of Silence

It is 3:14 am. The city outside my window has finally stopped pretending it is alive. In this hollowed-out silence, I find myself thinking about the weight of stone and the way we build cages to house our ambitions. We stack our lives into vertical lines, hoping that if we climb high enough, we might escape the gravity of our own mistakes. But the higher we go, the more the world below turns into a grid of shadows, unrecognizable and cold. We are just patterns of light trapped in a concrete maze, convinced that our movement is progress. We mistake the height of our walls for the depth of our character. I wonder if the buildings feel the exhaustion of holding us up, or if they are simply waiting for the moment we stop reaching for the sky and finally look at the ground beneath our feet. What happens to the space we leave behind when we are no longer there to occupy it?

Keith Goldstein has captured this feeling in his image titled Manhatta. It is a stark reminder of how small we become when we are part of a larger design. Does the height change the way you see your own life?