What does ivory tower mean?

Ivory Tower, French translation of C? te d 'Ivoire, latour. The Ivory Tower is based on the fourth quarter of Chapter 7 of the Song of Songs in the Old Testament. Solomon, the wise and rich king of Israel, wrote 65,438+0,005 poems, among which Song of Songs is a love song. In the fifth song, the groom praised the bride like this: "... your neck is like an ivory tower. Your eyes are near the gate of Bartrabbi in Heshbon, like a pool ... (... your neck is like an ivory tower; Your eyes are like a pool near the sliding door of Heshbon Patna; ……)。 Obviously, the "ivory tower" here is only used to describe the beautiful neck of the bride.

Later, the word "ivory tower" was gradually applied to all aspects of social life, mainly referring to "an isolated fantasy, a paradise to escape from real life, and an isolated place". In Chinese, the ivory tower originally refers to ignoring the ugly and miserable life of the real society and engaging in writing in its ideal and happy situation, which means escaping from the real society, staying away from life, hiding in a lonely and comfortable personal world and engaging in writing activities with subjective fantasies; The extended meaning is mainly "a metaphor for the small world of writers and artists who are divorced from real life" Universities and research institutes are such places. Zhou Zuoren used the metaphor of a scholar who lives in a high tower. It may be influenced by Chuchuan Baicun's Out of the Ivory Tower.