Of Bridges

"In this wide-ranging and erudite book, Thomas Harrison gives a panoramic account of the many meanings and valences of bridges in human culture. He considers the impulse to build bridges in early human civilizations and the way bridges linked the transience of human life and the eternal realm of the divine. He visits historical bridges over which people have gone to battle, discusses metaphorical bridges, such as those in musical composition, and probes the many connections between bridges and death, and bridges and love. Throughout, Harrison illustrates his discussions with a wide range of references from art, poetry, and philosophy, mostly though not exclusively from the European tradition, reaching back to antiquity"--