I just got back to the hotel after a midnight tour of the monuments with my Russian fiancée. The Capitol Building, despite all of the chicanery, is absolutely magnificent in its classical circular symmetry. The twenty-foot Statue of Freedom that crowns the dome is still the spindle around which the world rotates.
The Washington Monument is so tall and gracefully proportioned that you have to stand at the base of it to realize just how shockingly massive that structure is. Lincoln sits in grim majesty, as if keeping an eye on those miscreants at the end of the national mall. Jefferson stands alone, away from Washington and Lincoln, and all of the war monuments; looking at the placement of the building and the statue inside it you get the impression that the architect of freedom is somehow too regal, too aristocratic to mix with the lesser gods just across the pool of water.
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