I can't be the only one who feels that the anniversary of Sept. 11 has sprung up on us with remarkably little attention. That the epoch-making horror of our lifetime would become something that would remembered in the context of the calendar, set amongst events and memories great and small, new and old. For years I was certain that that this would remain the thing around which all else revolved, and it certainly did for awhile. But this year feels like the first time I've noticed that its place in our imagination has evolved — that we have processed the details well, choosing what to cling to and what to forget — even as we continue to stumble through the world born that day.
I can see it in the way the day is commemorated, which is similar to how it always is: the gathering at Ground Zero for the recitation of the names. It is an event that is always touching and sad, but is certainly no longer "news" the way it was for many years. One of the most telling things about our culture over the past few decades has been our insistence on remembering tragedy through each individual name. It reflects in part our understanding of the value of each human life, which is a sort of triumph of human empathy if you think about it in a historical context. But I would suggest it also reflects the way we perceive the world, of our (post)modern divided consciousness that includes what we see and know face to face, and what we absorb through images and broadcasts and the internet. It is as though each individual one of us can't process enormous, inhuman tragedy unless we can get a human handle on it. A long time ago, you heard news about things like this by word of mouth, or a newspaper, and what you heard was a story. Someone — an eyewitness, a reporter, basically, another person — began putting it into a narrative that made sense for you. All we have now is a fractured jumble of images and sounds and bits of commentary. So I wonder we choose to remember with such loving attention on the names as a crutch, out of the fear that otherwise we'll make too great an abstraction of something we instinctively know should remain personal and immediate.
But the trouble with doing so is that time wins this argument, as it wins all arguments. Today, the names are being read once again, and it means something desperately important to a lot of people, but less and less to most of us. I just checked, and you have to scroll halfway down the NY Times website to find any mention of Sept. 11.
What is real, and what remains, are the ideas that sounded like trite pundit-speak from the moment they appeared. That we do truly live in another world, that nothing has been the since. So much that has happened in these 12 years reflect this. Consider how we've trundled off to war and come back again, and now find ourselves paralyzed by what to do about Syria. There is a lot we can look back upon with remorse, because we know that if we hadn't squandered so much goodwill from that day — the one point of hope in an otherwise perfectly horrible thing — we might live in a better world today. We live with all that, everyday.
On anniversaries you are reminded to "remember," as if there is a danger we might forget, and it's perhaps too painful to think about how they remind us how far we've gone. Perhaps this is natural, but this year seems like the first that I've felt Sept. 11 was a very long time ago. This is the first year that I've looked at snapshots of the victims and noticed how out of style their glasses and shirts are.
What doesn't change is how shocking the images remain, no matter how familiar they are. If you think about it, you don't really see them that often because we've done an astonishing job of censoring them from ourselves. We saw the images of exploding airplanes, of tumbling towers, of falling bodies, of clouds of rubble, and knew they were stuck with us. We tagged them as "very super important" and carefully filed them away, and we don't live with them in anything like the way I thought we would.
And since this is a moment to reflect on the past, there is also bound up with it a moment to think about the future. Without being morbid, just realistic, it is likely the next great tragedy, will be recorded on a million smartphones. Already, our experience of the next thing is being shaped, and it will be very different than Sept. 11.
I can see it in the way the day is commemorated, which is similar to how it always is: the gathering at Ground Zero for the recitation of the names. It is an event that is always touching and sad, but is certainly no longer "news" the way it was for many years. One of the most telling things about our culture over the past few decades has been our insistence on remembering tragedy through each individual name. It reflects in part our understanding of the value of each human life, which is a sort of triumph of human empathy if you think about it in a historical context. But I would suggest it also reflects the way we perceive the world, of our (post)modern divided consciousness that includes what we see and know face to face, and what we absorb through images and broadcasts and the internet. It is as though each individual one of us can't process enormous, inhuman tragedy unless we can get a human handle on it. A long time ago, you heard news about things like this by word of mouth, or a newspaper, and what you heard was a story. Someone — an eyewitness, a reporter, basically, another person — began putting it into a narrative that made sense for you. All we have now is a fractured jumble of images and sounds and bits of commentary. So I wonder we choose to remember with such loving attention on the names as a crutch, out of the fear that otherwise we'll make too great an abstraction of something we instinctively know should remain personal and immediate.
But the trouble with doing so is that time wins this argument, as it wins all arguments. Today, the names are being read once again, and it means something desperately important to a lot of people, but less and less to most of us. I just checked, and you have to scroll halfway down the NY Times website to find any mention of Sept. 11.
What is real, and what remains, are the ideas that sounded like trite pundit-speak from the moment they appeared. That we do truly live in another world, that nothing has been the since. So much that has happened in these 12 years reflect this. Consider how we've trundled off to war and come back again, and now find ourselves paralyzed by what to do about Syria. There is a lot we can look back upon with remorse, because we know that if we hadn't squandered so much goodwill from that day — the one point of hope in an otherwise perfectly horrible thing — we might live in a better world today. We live with all that, everyday.
On anniversaries you are reminded to "remember," as if there is a danger we might forget, and it's perhaps too painful to think about how they remind us how far we've gone. Perhaps this is natural, but this year seems like the first that I've felt Sept. 11 was a very long time ago. This is the first year that I've looked at snapshots of the victims and noticed how out of style their glasses and shirts are.
What doesn't change is how shocking the images remain, no matter how familiar they are. If you think about it, you don't really see them that often because we've done an astonishing job of censoring them from ourselves. We saw the images of exploding airplanes, of tumbling towers, of falling bodies, of clouds of rubble, and knew they were stuck with us. We tagged them as "very super important" and carefully filed them away, and we don't live with them in anything like the way I thought we would.
And since this is a moment to reflect on the past, there is also bound up with it a moment to think about the future. Without being morbid, just realistic, it is likely the next great tragedy, will be recorded on a million smartphones. Already, our experience of the next thing is being shaped, and it will be very different than Sept. 11.
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