We are riding a sightseeing bus through New York City, from Times Square to the southern tip of Manhattan. We were here once before, thirty years ago. The city is still fascinating, still pulsing, and probably really does never sleep.
Our arrival had already overwhelmed us all over again: the street canyons, the traffic, the people, the sounds, the density. Above it all, the buildings you have long known before you see them in front of you again.
The Empire State Building. Rockefeller Center. Radio City Music Hall. Central Park. One Vanderbilt, where the city stages another version of itself in mirrors, glass and height. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum, sombre and extraordinary.
And, again and again, the view across the Hudson from Weehawken: Manhattan as one entire, almost unreal skyline.
New York is not a city you simply look around. It draws you in. It demands attention, energy and time — and constantly gives you new images in return. So we stay longer than planned. Not because there is one more particular sight we need to tick off. But because we cannot get enough of this city.
And yet the feeling is different from thirty years ago. Back then, New York seemed to us an icon of the future. Or rather: the future made real. Today, much of it feels to us as though it has stood still.
The Empire State Building is still the most beautiful skyscraper.
That is a compliment. But perhaps also a symptom.
We visit Radio City Music Hall. The Rockettes feel as though they belong to another era. For many of the Americans on our tour, they are the absolute highlight — perhaps even a highlight of New York itself.
You sense how much this city lives not only through its present, but also through the images of its own great past.
Of all places, it is at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum that we encounter the extraordinary most powerfully. That this should be a place of catastrophe feels almost bizarre. Almost cynical.
Perhaps we have changed. Perhaps America has changed. Perhaps, above all, the world around America has changed. In our minds, we compare New York with Bangkok, Singapore or Dubai. In recent years, we have felt something there of what we felt in New York thirty years ago: the sense that this is where the future is making its way.
None of this makes New York insignificant.
Quite the opposite. It is still one of the most exciting cities we know. It is full of energy, ideas, stories and people going somewhere. It has a density of images and symbols that few other cities can match.
But it no longer seems self-evidently the place where tomorrow’s world first becomes visible.
Perhaps we only understand part of “Make America Great Again” when we read the phrase as more than grandiosity, backward-looking nostalgia or political mobilisation.
Perhaps it also contains a deeper longing: to be the country from which the future emerges once again.
Not just rich, not just powerful, but extraordinary. “Great” not only as power and size, but as a promise: to be the place where the future becomes real.