WTN: spire
James Harbeck
spire
If you, as an architect, aspired to inspire, what might you do? Would you conspire to spear the air? A tower of any shape has the dominating height that looms like an adult over a small child, but mere parapets, however parental, do not quite get to the point like a spire does.
In part it’s a matter of perspective: a spire can seem to disappear into the celestial sphere rather than coming to a blunt end. From any angle, it has more to spare. And it can come in many forms – pyramidal, conical, octagonal, even spiral – but it is always poised like a stylus or quill to write in the welkin.
Well, then, what does it write? What words does this needle tattoo in the heavens, or in your mind? It is simple enough to see it in words like conspire, inspire, and so on, and to hear its similarity to spear and perhaps spare and, of course, spiral. We might well expect it’s related to some of them; at the very least, the resemblance can be a reminder, which can add incidental flavours and expectations – the sort of thing that justifies the luxury of having overlapping senses of spiral and helix, for instance: they still sound and seem different because echoes and overtones conspire to inspire, or lift like helium.
But what, really, are resemblances, and how far can they go? What things are the same thing as other things, and what merely look alike? We know it only goes to a point. What, for instance, is the essence of a spire? Let me put it this way: Do you know what the highest spire in the world is? You may think of cathedrals in Salisbury and Cologne and so on, because a spire, of course, is a thing on a church. But all the highest spires are buildings of commerce and capital and occasionally communication, rising from the street without sanctuary or nave or transept. The highest spire in the world is the Burj Khalifa. And I live near another that used to be the highest, the CN Tower. Do you get the point? A spire needs not aspire to divinity to inspire. It needs only be a… what, a spear into the sky?
Perhaps, but etymologically, no: the word is not from, or a cousin of, spear, though there may have been some cross-influence through similarity – especially since the Old English source of spire, spir, was pronounced like modern spear, which in its turn came from Old English spere, which sounded more like how we would say “spare a.” Nor, by the way, is spire related to any of the breath-related spire words such as respire and inspire. Instead, spire is a word originally for the stalk or stem of a plant. A blade of grass, perhaps, or the peak of a tree. Something growing from the earth and reaching sharply for the sky – but just to a point.
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