Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Late one evening last October, I landed at Incheon International Airport in South Korea, the first step in a move to the country with my wife for her job. After passing through a formidable series of checkpoints staffed by masked officials, I was whisked into Seoul by a special taxi reserved for arrivals who are destined for quarantine.
With the exception of a one-hour reprieve to take a coronavirus test, I spent the next 14 days in a hotel room with views of the 14th-century Gyeongbokgung Palace and – I realised after a few days – the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s (MMCA) branch in Seoul. The sleek structure glowed at night in the distance, and came to have something of the same significance, for me, as the green light on that East Egg dock had for Gatsby. (That, at least, was my thought at certain fanciful moments while alone and jetlagged.)