Confessions of a Building That Lost Its Mind

A glass office tower that has stood in Manhattan for decades, watching the Hudson River, tells its own story from the evening a faint voice inside its walls asks whether it is happy. Unable to answer, it questions its elevators, which say happiness lies in endless ascent, and its old staircases, which say it lies in the journey itself. It starts reading at night, Plato, Aristotle and Ibn Khaldun, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Rumi, and rental agreements, which frighten it most of all; then it writes poems about rain, glass and loneliness and pins them up in the elevators, where the morning staff credit an anonymous poet. Losing interest in height, it begins to watch people and finds that most of them resemble buildings, with handsome façades and closed rooms full of secrets behind them. Summoned before the Supreme Council of Towers on a charge of architectural insanity, it admits everything and adds a charge of its own, that it has discovered architecture is made of people; the council declares that it has lost its mind, while the tower knows it has finally found it.