Rocking the Reading Room

Photo courtesy Flickr

In 1963, I heard the librarian of Congress lecture on the origin of the Gothic arch. He had spent twenty years gazing up at the elegant dome over the library’s reading room and realized suddenly that the Gothic arch was a segment of a dome.

The simplest way to draw a circle is to draw a square and then draw diagonals at forty-five degrees across each corner. The eye will read that structure as a circle. The librarian realized that the sphere of the dome had originated as a square and been refined with several more rotations from the center.

He went on to discuss the significance of rock music, then a new medium. He said the community bonding, or catharsis, that is the essence of classical Greek drama is present at a concert, too.

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