Vertically Immortal

Does it ever happen to you to wake up in the morning and start your day drinking a coffee (and sometimes smoking a cigarette!) thinking about philosophical strange things? Well, to me it happens all the time! I was reading an article about those architectural works, made only for temporary things that ultimately for some reason or another just remain in our reality for good. Structures built for the Olympic games that, most of the time get destroyed after the games are over but sometimes authorities decide to keep them for social, cultural, or whatever other reasons. Sometimes these pieces become part of the urban realms they belong to perfectly fitting in, sometimes they just dont as they become what we say in italian a "hole in the water": too expensive, unfunctional and so on. Obviously the best example of all is the Eiffel Tower in Paris (not in Vegas!!!). Built for the International Exhibition of Paris of 1889 it was ultimately decided to keep it eventhough it was supposed to stand there for a maximum of 20 years and then be dismantled. Today it is one of the most well known landmark in the world. It stands there, in the Champs de Mars, as the most impressive Parisian icon. Its vertical presence becomes very strong not only visually but also in its meaning. It is a very powerful work of engineering, mediatic presence since it appeared in numerous movies, quoted in many songs, pictured in thousands of postcards, shot in million of pictures, and yes, it is today a money machine!
But then, when walking there, below it, around it simply adiring it from different angles it made me see the concept of temporality in a different way. You see this vertical imposing structure , maybe while sitting on a bench of the Camps, you shoot some pictures and you realize that at the end, immortal or not, it feel like a natural presence. Like a tree. What is at the end the difference between the tower and a tree? They're both directed towards the sky. Photosynthesis in one, throuhg which nature lives and survives through light, lights, flashes in the other process through which its symbolic nature survives. If in a tree the main vertical (liquid) movement is what brings life to its components, in the tower people are are vertically elevated to the top bringing life to the structure. They both live from bottom up. Are they both immortal. Some trees are supposed to be, for the tower...who knows...surely its iconographic image will be printed in our collective memory forever. But we are unfortunaly not yet immortal!