Dialectic

Abstract

LORD, shall we not bring these gifts to your service?

Shall we not bring to your service all our powers

For life, for dignity, grace and order, And intellectual pleasures of the senses?

The LORD who created must wish us to create

And employ our creation again in His service

Which is already His service in creating.

For man is joined spirit and body,

And therefore must serve as spirit and body.

Visible and invisible, two worlds meet in Man;

Visible and invisible must meet in his temple;

You must not deny the body.

Choruses from "The Rock"

T.S. Eliot

We read in this stanza, from a T.S. Eliot poem, a description of man. Here we find man as a created being experiencing the two separate worlds that merge within him. We witness the coexistence of these two worlds in life and death, in our ideals and our temporality, in what we desire to be and what we are.

This thesis is a study (in architectural terms) of humanity touching the ideal, of the ephemeral brushing the eternal. And beauty, I must not deny beauty.