A Pair of Puzzling Virtues

The entrance of the building is iconic .  So much so that many people feel they have seen it in a photograph or a movie, even if they cannot name the building.  It's no wonder its appearance is easy to remember:  Two large statues of lions, one on each side of a wide set of stone stairs that lead to a formal entrance in a style that says "government building."  It is the New York Public Library in the heart of Manhattan, built in 1911.

Even people who find the entrance a familiar image  -- especially with those two lion statues -- are not likely to know that those lions have names: Patience and Fortitude.  The statues thus exemplify an older era, one in which human virtues were frequently commended to people by symbolizing each virtue with an appropriate animal.  I confess to being a bit puzzled by the choice of lions, especially representing Patience and Fortitude.  True, some children climbing those stairs, upon seeing the lion, might think of the noble lion Aslan in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.  However, what Aslan displayed, contrasted to the people around him, was wisdom. Moreover, the New York Public Library, with its formal reading room, is primarily aimed at adults, not children.

I was also a bit surprised upon discovering the statues' names because, during my own lifetime in the U.S., most people's first thought about lions has been that they are frightening predators -- seemingly the "top of the food chain" in Africa.  However, when I recall recent TV nature documentaries showing how lions are successful in getting food in only a fraction of their attacks upon prey, I can admit that real lions do require both patience and fortitude.  But that is a contemporary association.  The statues are a century old.

The more puzzling thing to me about those two imposing beasts on each side of the library's front staircase is what message it might convey to a prospective library-user who is about to enter the building.  Is that person being warned off by two animals that could tear a person apart?  Even knowing that the lions symbolize patience and fortitude does not solve the puzzle for me.  Why have those two qualities been chosen as virtues that someone exploring and reading books will need?

I would have held up a different quality (even for a time period before computers, when locating a particular book or periodical required more time and patience than today).  I would have recommended Curiosity.  When I look back both upon my discovering books before I could even read, and upon what has kept me reading throughout my life, I would have named Curiosity as the primary quality that has kept me going.

But then, if I try to imagine some alternative statue  -- one symbolizing curiosity -- I have to admit that a life-size statue of a house-cat would not have provided the grandeur the entrance of a great library deserves.  Not to mention the problem that some people, upon seeing such a cat-statue, might be frightened off by recalling the old warning that "curiosity killed the cat."

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What quality has motivated your reading?  Is there any animal that expresses that quality?

(The photo of the cat statue is used under a

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license by Frank Vincentz.)

Rising Above a Narrow Vision

My wife recalls a day in her teens when she helped shingle the steep roof of her mother's Michigan house.  My wife says that being on such a high slope was so scary that by the end of the afternoon she had worn off most of the fabric of the seat of her jeans, having never dared stand up.  I know myself that sloped roofs can be scary.  However, in many cultures down through time, and even today, a flat, level roof has been a means to rise above the pressures of life, to lift one's spirits, re-connect with Nature, and even expand one's vision.

I have experienced myself that occasional desire "to get away from earth awhile," as Robert Frost put it in his poem "Birches."  However, because I grew up in U.S. suburbs, I did not experience firsthand how claustrophobic living in a dense city can at times become.  So, I think it was through the R & B song "Up on the Roof" that I first heard testimony of how healing to the human spirit getting up on a roof can be.   People living in dense cities, and especially in ghettos, do not have pliant sling-like birches to lift themselves and their spirits above the ground when life's burdens get too heavy.  A roof can help.  As the songwriters Gerry Goffin and Carole King conveyed, getting "Up on the Roof" can enable a person to rise above the street noise, and above walls that are too close, and even above life's troubling cares.

rooftops in Athens

In many countries of the Mideast, houses have been traditionally built with flat roofs, in part because of the hot climate.  Unlike that wintry climate in which my wife's mother's house was built with a steep roof so snow would not accumulate, Mideastern peoples have had to deal with heat.  A cave-like house is protection against the daytime sun. But once the sun has been down awhile, being up on the roof -- even sleeping up there -- can be a relief.  So important has been the roof as one living space that ancient Jewish law in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) included a building code requiring that "When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof.. [because someone might] fall from it." (Deut. 22:8, NRSV).

Roofs can be a place for cooling off, both literally and figuratively.   They can even be a place for raising one's sights as we re-connect with the healing touch of Nature.  A light breeze.  The sight perhaps of a distance shore.  And seeing the stars.

stars wider than our vision

The most expressive testimony I have read to that fact was by a twelve-year old black urban girl, as recorded by the psychologist Robert Coles.  In the girl's own words:  "I guess I'm doin' all right....  A  lot of time, though, I wish I could... find myself... a place where I could walk and walk, and I'd be walking on grass, not cement....  At night, sometimes, when I get to feeling real low, I'll climb up the stairs to our [apartment's] roof, and I'll look at the sky, and I'll say hello there, you moon and all your babies -- stars!  [U]p there, I feel I can stop and think about what's happening to me-- it's the only place I can, the only place."

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Have you experienced Nature's ability to lift spirits?  Has that ever involved expanding your vision?

(The quotation by the girl is from Robert Coles's introduction in

The Geography of Childhood, by Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble, © 1994. p. xxii.)