In The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies by Roland Barthes, he goes in depth about, predictably, the Eiffel Tower but not about how the tower is built or why it was built but about its significance to us who view it. When we think about the Eiffel tower, the immediate thought that comes after it would Paris, at least for most people, and Barthes would agree, he says in the passage “It’s simple primary shape confers upon it the vocation of an infinite cipher: in turn and according to the appeals of our imagination, the symbol of Paris, of modernity.” But why is that? Looking at it purely from a observational perspective the tower is nothing more than a huge pile of welded-together metal shaped like a pointy “A”, it has no purpose whatsoever, not like how a hospital is used for treating ill people, how train stations are used to travel from one place to another, or how a convenience store is used for, well, convenience. Nothing is really noteworthy about the tower, except for maybe its monumental size but it’s not really something different from other skyscrapers that are built in other cities. Yet the tower, as Barthes puts it, “Receives each year twice as many visitors as the Louvre and considerably more than the largest movie house in Paris.” So, an obvious question would be, well why is that the case? Well, it differs from people to people, it could be that someone might want to visit the tower because it’s a historical monument, others might do so because they believe that you haven’t really been to Paris if you haven’t visited the Eiffel tower at least once, or maybe because they want to make memories they’d want to remember for the rest of their lives there. But there is one thing all of these have in common, and it’s the feeling of sublimity and power over the world. The Eiffel Tower is a bastion of humanity, it represents what we as a species are capable of and what we can yet do if we put our collective minds into it. People visit it because they want to feel like they have the world under them and that they rule it absolutely (not in a literal sense but a metaphorical one). As Barthes says “The Tower ultimately reunites with the essential function of all major human sites: autarchy.” which is a word commonly linked with absolute power. Which makes sense, the tower represents an idea and a reality that those of us who want to visit want to be apart of as well.