(Washington, DC) Over the weekend, I finished Mark Kingwell’s excellent book Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams. By coincidence, I spent today in an office three blocks south of the actual Empire State Building. I saw it first from an airport taxi, got a good direct look at it from the window on 31st Street, walked by its front door, and then watched it vanish over Queens on my way to La Guardia.

Seeing it, however, is problematic–that is one of Kingwell’s themes. First of all, it is actually very big. If you are far enough away to see the whole thing, it becomes misleadingly small, unremarkable, dwarfed by routine buildings closer by, sometimes just an extra piece of equipment in the backdrop of a New Jersey auto dealership or a Brooklyn lot. If you come close enough to sense its scale, it veers away so sharply that you can’t really see anything. What you do glimpse is just the skin. It’s a three-dimensional structure; to experience it fully (if such a thing were possible) would require going inside: time and motion would be needed as well as vision.

The Empire State Building is also hard to “see” because you have seen it so many times before, in real life, in postcards and movies, inside snow globes, on tee-shirts, carved as chocolates or soaps. As a result of all that mechanical reproduction, you carry the wrong shape in your mind. In my memory, it had more stone and less steel, more shoulder and less head, than in my experience today.

And it’s a hard object to see because savvy New Yorkers don’t stare up at it, whether they’re walking down the street or in meetings on 31st Street. They are too busy, too blasé. Tourists were standing around the entrance on Fifth Avenue, and since I was also a tourist but didn’t want to seem one, I hurried past.

From the taxi, though, it was OK to stare. The building looked a little solitary, standing down there in the thirties. I recalled Kingwell’s idea that the Chrysler Building is its uptown girlfriend; they seemed a little distant. At first sight, on a grey day, the Empire State Building looked pixilated, like a stack of tiny cubes with angular edges all the way to the Deco dirigible dock at the top. A surprising dark stripe crossed its belly.

I wrote the above on the plane from New York to DC, without really reaching a conclusion before we had to put computers away for landing. We came in low over the Potomac, Georgetown lamps shimmering on the river, the Lincoln Memorial’s skylights glowing upward, and the obelisk standing in the middle of it all. It may have been a trick of the perspective–or something to do with my twenty years of past wrapped up in Washington–but it looked grander than the city we had left.

We are back from an Alpine driving vacation. I don’t post travelogues on my blog, but I will mention a highlight to give a flavor of our trip. The little Italian town of Glurns is missing from many guidebooks but is amazingly appealing. Part of Austria until 1919, it is still German-speaking. It is at 900 meters and surrounded by much higher mountains. Six miles away is Switzerland, and over the border is a valley where the main language is Romansch.

Each of the three roads into Glurns passes through a gothic gate bearing the two-headed Hapsburg eagle. The city wall is mostly complete, and outside rushes a steep mountain stream.

In the middle of town, there’s a picture-perfect square with a fountain. The plan (with a forum at the center and radiating streets) presumably dates to Roman times, when Colurnus was a stop on the Roman road across the Alps.

The Laubengasse or Via dei Portici is completely lined with low porticoes on both sides, so that it’s possible to walk its whole length without facing the elements. Most of the buildings probably have long and complex histories of construction and reconstruction, but the dominant period for visible facades is the 16th century. The church towers bear onion domes.

Today’s population is less than 1,000. For backpackers, skiers, and climbers, there are magnificent Italian and Swiss national parks to the south: Alpine wilderness areas. For history buffs, there’s the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Convent of St. John in Müstair, Switzerland, just hiking distance away. We found the Convent itself to be rather modest, but it has been a continuous religious community for 1,230 years and it houses remarkable murals painted around 800–extraordinarily early examples of Christian art in what must have been wild country when Charlemagne passed through on his way to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome.

I am on a long journey: Boston -> Washington -> Boston -> London -> Lisbon, all within 48 hours. I had a layover at Heathrow that was long enough to allow me a quick trip to Paddington and then back to the airport. I walked a circuit of a few miles: Paddington to Notting Hill Gate, Hyde Park, South Kensington, Gloucester Road, Kensington High Street, Kensington Church Street, Bayswater Road, and back to Paddington.

I have spent about eight years in this city, including almost every summer from ages 0-20, plus five school years. Nostalgic by temperament, I am fond of London for quasi-objective reasons as well as strictly personal ones. Actually, it would be hard for anyone to deny the elegance of Kensington on a cloudless spring day. But I admire much more of the city than its wealthiest squares and mewses. London has been a polyglot entrepot since Chaucer’s day, when Lombards and Flemings were especially important residents, and it has become an amazingly multiracial and multicultural metropolis in the 21st century.

The underlying English culture is absorptive and adaptive. London changes faster than New York (the supposed capital of creative destruction) because both market and state have the power to reorganize this city in each generation. After just a few years away, all the retail chains seem new, people eat and drink different things everywhere, the transportation system has been sold, resold, and reconfigured, the slang is new, uniformed workers speak different languages (I heard lots of Polish and Spanish today), and whole new neighborhoods seem to have sprung up. Yet the bricks are still made of London Clay, which the Romans used here. Ladies still pull tartan shopping baskets home from Sainsbury’s. Stinging nettles still force their way between railroad tracks and garden sheds. The morning streets still smell of wet cement, curry, and beer.

A little more than a week ago, we were in Toledo, that ancient city where Muslim, Catholic, and Jewish faiths and cultures flourished and intermingled between the years 1000 and 1500. We spent the day wandering into cathedrals, mosques, and synagogues and along winding alleys that concealed lush patios. The driving wind carried wet snow.

My endurance for this kind of thing can be a bit greater than my family’s, so at dusk, I proceeded alone to the Hospital de San Juan Batista, a vast Renaissance structure on the outskirts of town.

I turned out to be the hospital’s sole visitor. I found my way to the chapel and then down into the crypt. Here, several stories underground, are buried grandees from the Spanish ducal house of Medinaceli, one of the most ancient in Europe. They include a duke who was shot by Republican forces in Madrid in the 1930s and his widow who lived alone in the Hospital–in grim splendor–for many postwar decades.

I took three steps toward the marble sarcophagi. Someone else took three steps behind me. I turned, expecting to see a guard: no one. I took two more steps, and two more sounded as clearly behind. You know that it was an echo. I knew it, too, but it was quite hard to believe it, hundreds of feet beneath this city of inquisitors, heretics, martyrs, and ghosts. The hair stood on the back of my neck, and I retreated before I could read the names on those tombs.