Republic of Korea (1)
We touched down at Incheon airport just before sunset, the low disc a color I’d never seen, an almost lavender pink (was the window tinted?), the Yellow Sea not yellow but metallic blue except where it gave back the lavender glow, and finely grooved as a phonograph record. All around the river’s mouth small dark islands projected forest and cliff.
Seoul from the air looks like ten or fifteen separate cities dropped into the vacant spots between palisades of green mountain. Once you’re on the ground, the high-rises (which outstrip humble California and clump together in centrally mandated ways that in Europe would indicate the Iron Curtain) block the peaks until one or another rears up in the opening of an avenue or river. At times a palace or museum more deliberately courts the effect. Very soon you learn to distinguish pyramidal Bugaksan, wide rocky Inwangsan, humped Namsan with its tower. I’ve never seen a city more situated in beauty—I can’t say “beautiful city,” since coherence of form is both lacking and superfluous to its purposes. It’s like London; old-new and huge, a place where it obviously all happens at once.
