Name: Rudyard Kipling's Bridge Builders: "Never look backwards or you'll fall down the stairs."
Price: 38.23 NZD
Availability: InStock
Author: Kipling, Rudyard
ISBN: 9781780008189

portada Rudyard Kipling's Bridge Builders: "Never look backwards or you'll fall down the stairs."

Rudyard Kipling's Bridge Builders: "Never look backwards or you'll fall down the stairs."

Type

Physical Book

Author

Rudyard Kipling

Publisher

Word to the Wise

Language

English

Pages

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

22.9 x 15.2 x 0.2 cm

Weight

0.05 kg.

ISBN13

9781780008189

Synopsis "Rudyard Kipling's Bridge Builders: "Never look backwards or you'll fall down the stairs.""

"Never look backwards or you'll fall down the stairs."Bridge Builders (1893) by the British writer Rudyard Kipling is an Indian story about the building of the "Kashi Bridge." The story mainly displays Kipling's mastery of the technical details and knowledge related to bridge building. His biographers agree that the author acquired this knowledge through interacting with British civil engineers who were assigned by the Crown to build numerous bridges in India as part of the industrial movement in British India. The building of the "Kashi" is under the supervision of Engineer Findlayson. At a certain moment, Findlayson is lured into opium consumption and apparently starts to hallucinate. He dreams that the bridge is threatened to be destroyed by Indian gods who consider such a project as a desecration of the natural world. They decide to flood the city and the question that keeps on haunting Findlayson's mind is whether his bridge would survive the natural catastrophe or not. Fortunately for him, the bridge eventually resists the flood. Behind its simple plot, Kipling's story inspires serious philosophical and existential questions related to the duality between science and the spiritual. Symbolically speaking, Findlayson's project stands for an atheist man's belief in materialistic reality and scientific progress in the face of a traditional and spiritual India that resists all acts of desecration. Findlayson himself is aware that his triumph over Indian gods is only temporary as the bridge will one day or another disappear and all men will be ultimately vanquished by death without solving the question of eternity.

Rudyard Kipling

(Author)

View Author's Page

Bombay, (1865-1936). Rudyard Kipling wrote novels, poems, and stories mainly set in India and Burma during the British rule. Kipling was a prolific and popular writer, and his literature always revolves around three axes: patriotism, the duty of the English to lead a life of intense activity, and the destiny of England, called to be a great empire. His insistence on this last aspect was undoubtedly an echo of the Victorian past, and severely damaged his reputation as a writer, despite being the first British author awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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