Nicolas Pol: Student's Choice - To Live Between the Tower and Mountain (personal reflection)

 Hello all, 


This is my first blog post, and I am challenging myself to write a blog post for every single day until I reach the fifteen-count mark!


For my first blog post, I wanted to write about the age-old concept of The Tower. 

In this class, we have learned that the tower is the symbol of the urban environment. It is a metaphorical acropolis that can be seen and embodied by any city. The tower is responsible for the shaping of norms, values, and religious beliefs/practices. 

While the tower is deeply-rooted in the human-made environment, the tower cannot stand without the natural counterpart: the mountain. To destroy the tower is to destroy the cultural/religious value of the mountain. And vice-versa, to destroy the mountain is to destroy the tower, as the tower relies on the mountain for resources. In "Ecology of Eden," we see Bronze-age cultures show the symbolic mutualism between the tower and mountain in Chapter 11 with the Sumerian myth of Enmerkar. 

I think that my experience of Virginia has flipped back and forth sporadically between the tower and the mountain. 

I grew up in The Plains, VA, which is at the peak of the Blue Ridge Mountain range. It is a small village with a population of 200 (literally!) My graduating high-school class was only 36 people. During our English classes, we would read Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and Leopold's "Sand-County Almanac" out in the woods in solitude. While reading these texts, I would see this scene:


One could say that I lived in a pastorialized-version of nature. I never saw the hard labor of maintaining the land. I only got to enjoy the nature, as if it were a source of entertainment. I also lived on a 70-acre estate, and spent my afternoons running through my family's paddocks with my sister. We would run wild, barefoot; cartwheels, picnic blankets, and foraging in the woods were the norm for me. 

That said, I never felt strictly a "country-boy." And to contextualize my upbringing, The Plains was only thirty miles away from Washington, D.C., where most of my friends lived. I was so used to the city life, that I would ride the metro on my own at the age of fifteen. Even though I lived in a rural world, my social values and norms were modeled after the people I knew in D.C. 

My friends and myself at a Pauly D Concert (The guy from Jersey Shore) at Echostage in D.C. 




I knew the tower and the mountain intimately, and I felt both were necessary to my upbringing. Perhaps humanity has failed to see the balance, as most of us only stick to either the mountain or the tower. And I admit that I have lost the balance when I came to college. In fact, I feel disconnected now from both the mountain and tower, as my environment is in an artificial hybrid of both: the suburbs of Newport News. By losing my experience with the tower and mountain, I feel that I have lost my understanding of my own environment. 


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