At first, when the building of the Tower of Babel was begun, everything went rather well; there was even too much order; there was too much talk of signposts, interpreters, workers’ lodgings, and roads of communication; it seemed there were centuries ahead in which to work at the idea. Better still, the general opinion was that one could never be slow enough; it would have taken very little to make people afraid of even digging the foundations. This was the reasoning: the essential thing about the whole enterprise is the idea of building a tower that reaches the heavens. Everything else, beside that, is secondary. Once grasped in its grandeur, the idea can no longer disappear: as long as there are men, there will be the desire, the ardent desire, to complete the building of the tower. Now, on this score, the future need worry no one; on the contrary, human knowledge is increasing, architecture has made and will make progress, a piece of work that takes a year in our time will perhaps, in a century, be carried out in six months, and better, and more durably. Why, then, exhaust oneself today to the very limit of one’s strength? That would make sense only if one could hope to build the tower within the span of a single generation. There was no counting on that. It was far more logical to imagine, on the contrary, that the next generation, in possession of more complete knowledge, would judge the work badly done, would tear down what its predecessors had built, and would begin again from scratch. Such ideas paralyzed energies, and, more than over the tower, people grew anxious about building the workers’ city. Each nation wanted the finest quarter, whence quarrels that ended in bloodshed. These conflicts never ceased; they furnished the leader with a new argument to prove that, for lack of unity, the tower could be built only very slowly, and even, preferably, once peace had been concluded. But not all the time was spent fighting; between two wars people worked at the embellishment of the city, which provoked, moreover, new jealousies, out of which came new conflicts. Thus passed the age of the first generation; and none, since, has differed from it; only know-how increased, and with it the desire to fight. Add to this that, by the second or third generation, the futility of building a tower that would reach the sky was recognized, but by then too many bonds had been forged for the city to be abandoned. All the songs and legends born there are full of the longing for a prophesied day when the city will be pulverized by the five blows of a gigantic fist. Five blows that will follow one another in quick succession. And that is why the city has a fist in its coat of arms.
(Trans. Alexandre Vialatte)