On Pike & Boren

Four pillars stand on the corner of Pike Street and Boren Avenue, on the Western edge of Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. In the summer, gutter punk kids hang out there, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, busking for quarters.

Until the '60s, these columns held up the entrance of Plymouth Congregational Church, demolished when I-5 was built  They have been left as remnants of an older, more innocent Seattle, a quiet Victorian seaside town that only exists today in faded photographs. Stripped of their Ionic capitals, they jut out of the Earth. It is a monument without memory, a footnote to a glittering young city.

The skyline has become the symbol of the American city, the Protestant work ethic translated into an image. It is the glossy picture on the cover of every tourist brochure, of every Chamber of Commerce booklet.

Approach closer. At night in downtown Seattle, you see empty office buildings glowing with cold fluorescent light, crackheads muttering to themselves on street corners, the homeless Indians, the secure entrances with triple-sheets of plate glass, rough concrete walls, loading docks. The contradictions of the city are made apparent.

In ancient ruins, the monuments have been cleansed of their contradictions. We only have sphinxes and palladia, the glories of the past. In the 19th Century, the Brits built fake Roman ruins on the manicured grounds of their estates, an attempt to transpose a nostalgia for the halcyon days of Greece and Rome to their own provincial, petty aristocracy.

At Sukhothai, I wandered among crumbling laterite stupas and elegantly carved Buddhas. On the bone-dry plains of Central Thailand, all that was left were pools and palaces, temples and throne halls. Gone were the ordinary rice farmers and laborers, the Lao slaves, the lepers, the broken backs and crushed arms, the purges and burnings. We have only traces of ancient majesty, the serenity of the dharma-king.

So much of the modern skyline is made of glass and steel. With North American weather, it seems likely that they will fold and crumble. All that will remain of Seattle's Washington Mutual Tower, Space Needle, and Columbia Center will be fragments. They will dissolve into silica and ferric oxide.

This isn't a bad thing. Albert Speer famously designed his Nazi halls to decay beautifully, to evoke the romantic sensibility of future poets. There's a sick fatalism in that, a sort of cultural refusal to consider present realities, a privileging of the mythic over the real.

I walk past the pillars again. The sun is setting behind the Olympic Mountains. What is beautiful and valuable about a city isn't the monuments it builds, the narratives it tells itself. It is transient moments like this, when light and color and shadow seem perfectly harmonized. The dark shape of a ship, loaded with cargo bound for Asia, cuts across the still water of the sound. I wait for a moment and stare, breathing in the cold air, before walking back up the hill to go have a slice of pizza and a drink.