07.26.08
Ex Machina
Perhaps it’s because I’m an engineer, but I find flying over a city at night to be a stunningly beautiful affair. Just as a downtown skyline stabs through the nighttime horizon, suburban sprawl forms an expansive portrait that fills the plane’s window-framed view. The serpentine expanses of asphalt, the stocky huddling of office buildings, and the slow trundle of automobiles all mesh together to form an intricate amalgam of man and machinery. The resulting spread of half-orderly lines and pinpricks of light is at once mesmerizing and inspiring.
At night, nature fades to obscurity. My aerial vista is solely the works of man. Every sodium-arc streetlight is a spark of humanity’s triumph over the tyrannical whims of nature – these commonplace truths of city living are our most tireless warriors in the fight to push back the darkness. I can’t help but consider the structures that enable the struggle to be fought at all – our immense infrastructure of power and transportation. Light requires power, generated from steam, fueled by coal, which is seized from darkness made bearable only by yet more electric light. Every step of the process is the result of lifetimes of planning and labor. Our modern world is the product of centuries of engineering.
Why do we so praise the beauty of nature, when it represents only divine whim? Of all the powers of an infinite god, the design of both flower and mountain seem insignificant in the grand scope of creation. We do not praise trivial accomplishments by men. Why exalt the smallest acts of omnipotence? Better to admire those creations which were wrought from glass and steel, those acts of men struggling to create. A city skyline represents the purest vision of our culture’s accomplishments. An expanse of streetlight-lined asphalt is an artery in the unfathomably complex body of civilization. These things are the fruit of the mind, the children of driven men and brilliant inventors. Do they not deserve our praise?