Showing posts with label Atlas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Atlas. Show all posts

14 June 2011

On A Bunch Of Strings

Have you ever come to the end of a workday feeling as if you'd carried the weight of the world on your shoulders?  


Well, all right, I didn't today.  And, truth be told, I never identified much with Atlas, even in my weight-lifting days.  I'd say that I identified more with Tiresias, though I could do without the blindness.  


Anyway, carrying the world on one's shoulders doesn't grab my fancy.  But suspending (or dangling) it on strings is fascinating (and pretty sexy, if you ask me). I think the people who design suspension bridges, and built certain kinds of boats, understood that:




I saw that "bridge" as I cycled through the World's Fair grounds on my way home.  Could they really be holding up those trees?  


Some kids think God works that way.  (At least, some of the kids I worked with twenty years ago thought so.)  And, I would suspect, more than a few adults think something like that, too, though in a less benevolent way than the kids see it.


So what were those strings supporting?  Well, I don't know whether they were actually supporting it, but they are attached to the skating rink in Flushing Meadow Park.  The rink is at one end of the park, which is probably as big as Manhattan's Central or Brooklyn's Prospect parks.  At the other end of the park is the Kissena Velodrome.


OK, there's my "string" to cycling.  I now feel I've rationalized the fact that this is in a cycling blog.  That's a huge weight off my shoulders!