Here’s a great line from Julian Jaynes’ book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. He says:
There is an awkward moment at the top of a Ferris wheel when, having come up the inside curvature, where we are facing into a firm structure of confident girders, suddenly that structure disappears, and we are thrust out into the sky for the outward curve down.
“Jaynes uses the Ferris wheel as a metaphor for that instant of uncertainty when a new truth reveals itself to us. He knows that the moment of discovery — or of understanding — holds a thrill of life-and-death terror.
So how did the Ferris wheel, and its strange metaphorical power, come into being? George Ferris, a young civil engineer, invented it. The new Eiffel Tower had been a nettle in Ferris’s mind. The French seized our imagination with their crazy tower. Now, America had to answer. By 1892 Ferris knew what to do. The French had driven a spire upward. He would create a great Ezekiel’s Wheel in the sky.
No. 508:
FERRIS’S WHEEL
by John H. Lienhard
