Our Own Babylon

The image above is a painting of the Tower of Babel. I have always really liked the stories behind the images of the Tower of Babel. While the most common story is usually presented as a Bible story, I like to look at it as a story with a life lesson behind it. I see this painting as a way of looking at ones own life when things are starting to fall apart - like the bricks used to build Babel are falling away. I've seen this image portrayed in many ways. But the version chosen for this review, by Michael Binyon, is a really amazing portrait. I love how the artist shows the whole tower just coming down and falling apart from the inside out, but all the while everything else around it is calm and serene. I interpret it to someone life the way that while your whole world could be coming down around you and falling apart from the inside out, the rest of the world will continue on and your own babel tragedy won't even effect anything else.
But I think that because the sky is also so clear and bright that it represents hope and the possibilty of a new future. Unlike the real Tower of Babel, we can rebuild our own towers and even make them better and stronger than they were to begin with. But I think that it all depends on whether or not we really want to rebuild and whether or not we have the strength to carry on ourselves.