> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.solidrevue.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Master of the Universe - URL: https://www.solidrevue.com/master-of-the-universe/ - Published: 2026-10-04T19:10:33.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-04T19:10:33.000Z - Author: Dietrich Minor We had waited four days for the rain to stop. A Nor’easter had made camp over us for our whole trip. Most of our plans up to this last morning had to bend around the rain. It came in sheets, with no discernible rhythm to it, just nonstop. With the right perspective it was romantic, but it had rained out this particular adventure. That morning we woke up with the sun creeping through the sheers in front of the blackout curtains in our hotel room. We rode the subway at the tail end of morning rush hour. The train only held two kinds of people. Tourist or someone who had clearly lost the fight with their alarm clock that morning. My girlfriend and I luckily were the tourists, and our only appointment was with a place that wasn’t moving. We were headed to the Empire State Building. I had my expectations of course. This building was a pop culture icon whose legacy had existed long before me and would surely outlast mine. I knew it from movies, television, or any number of marketing schemes. This building stood in my brain just as much as it stood in the skyline. We had tried to trek down to the One World Trade Center observation deck the day before, but the weather made the view obstructed and the kind security guard suggested that our money would be wasted. Maybe that view would have offered an antidote to the feeling we were left with while looking deep into the cavernous memorial pools where those towers once stood. The rain and overcast skies certainly added to the mood. But this morning the skies finally came through for us, and we got to the Empire State Building right as the doors opened, in with the first of the crowd. About a week before, I had listened to the Short History Of… podcast on the history of the Empire State Building and was prepared to share with Gillian the plethora of useless building-related tidbits. If she had asked, I surely would have told her how at the time of construction the design of the building was just considered modern and it wasn’t called an art-deco style until 1966\. We fast trekked to the elevators, not wasting any of our time taking in the first floor where they shared their version of the building’s history. All the various forms of multimedia entertainment of how it came to be and its impact on humanity throughout the years would have been for the other tourists, but not these ones. Although there was that brief photo op with one of those amusement-park-style hands of King Kong. Quickly we climbed to the 80th floor. It was just a tease of the view. There were windows that temporarily tricked the mind into thinking that the glass could have been a screen, no different from the televisions I had seen this view through in all its pop culture appearances. We turned the corner and the staff ushered us to another set of elevators that took us up to the 86th and final floor. The feeling of being just a voyeur to the skyline dissipated as we stepped out of the doors and I could feel the warm sun that we had been deprived of. You would have thought that with days of rain everything would have been drenched but the only tells that there was ever a storm were small puddles that had now all but evaporated between the uneven bricks on the deck of the observatory. I expected the wind to be strong because of the story of a dirigible that once tried to park at the top of the spire but it was too much for the now obsolete aircraft. However, that morning the wind was a gentle breeze that caused the clouds to slide by. Looking up to the top of the spire I could see the lowest hanging clouds nearly brush the top of the metal needle that tapered to nothing. The fence that encircled the whole area was arranged in a decorative pattern of diamond and triangle shapes, probably designed so it wouldn’t feel like it was holding you in. Because we had rushed to our destination only a few people had beaten us to the deck, maybe a dozen or so, but because of the size of the observatory we hadn’t truly been surrounded by people yet. As we made our way over to the south-facing side of the building, I could quickly make out in the distance where we had tried to go the day before. One World Trade Center from the ground looked like it disappeared into the sky like Jack’s beanstalk, but from this vantage, the tallest building in New York City seemed closer to a peer of our height. The expanse between the two buildings was littered with all manner of urban sprawl and human life. Spires shot straight up to such extremes that I was baffled how they didn’t just snap like a tree branch in a hard wind. Far below I could vaguely make out cars going down the broader streets. The people tethered to those streets were only dark specks brushing along the corridors. From there the noises came back up to us and car horns echoed all around. The only sound I could individually pick out was a siren that rose up somewhere off to our left. Some sort of activity requiring loudspeakers had started, but from where and why was lost on me. It could have been a block away or it could have been at the other end of the island, and I couldn’t have told you. There was a weight to viewing a sight that my brain couldn’t process. At first it was a moment of thrill, as if I were riding on a roller coaster and had finally tipped over the summit. That thrill was quickly replaced with the realization that every person across this vista was having a life as vivid and complicated as mine. My girlfriend was excited to share this with me. She had taken in this sight before and was more interested in my point of view. She saw me go quiet and asked, “So what do you think?” All my prepared tidbits had gone out the window. I reached for a fact about it being built during the Great Depression, but I’m sure I sounded more like a caveman stammering out a response like “View, big.” I could see it on her face that I was leaving her with confusion and a hair of worry. I knew I would be taken aback by this view, but I went into it thinking I would be inspired by the volume of life that would stand before me. I expected to see all the achievements of this city that was the center of human ambition and be so fired up that I’d spontaneously combust and be reborn with Wall Street suspenders and a nameplate on my desk that read Dietrich Minor, “Master of the Universe.” Damnit. I was wrong. As I looked at the entire world displayed before me in all its majesty, the sun beaming through this golden city for the first time in days, all I could feel was the despair of being so small and insignificant. It hit me like the fists of that behemoth ape who climbed to these heights before me. King Kong’s story was also one of climbing to the top only to be shot down. We all project onto him what it is we think he wanted up there, but I suppose being understood was never the same thing as being spared. Who am I to believe I could do something that would affect so many lives? How could I hope to participate in life the way this city beckoned me? How could I ever do anything that mattered? Clearly I had questions and this building was not answering them. I had come to this place built as evidence of human significance, in search of proof that I mattered. Instead, I was left with an airtight argument proving my interchangeability. I had come with a case against this building and lost. After clumsily trying to explain my feelings to my girlfriend, she had a reasonable rebuttal to my vertigo. I had been so lost in myself that I failed to notice that I hadn’t been alone this whole time. Standing next to me was someone who didn’t need the view to know my importance. She said, “Being just a small part of it all is freeing.” I understood what she meant, but in that moment I disagreed. I had gone up there hoping the size of everything would prove I could be big too. She was proposing that the opposite might be the relief, that I could stop trying to prove it. Not freedom from being insignificant. Freedom to stop performing significance. She was right there. Had I really spent so much time preparing for this moment that I had made it about me? I had succeeded at becoming a “Master of the Universe” and put myself at the center of it. The elevator descended quicker than it went up. The exit was through the gift shop. The performance that we mobbed past at the building’s entrance was now being sold back to us on the way out. We paused over a magnet, but how could something so small on our refrigerator contain how large that moment on the observation deck was?