The picture I couldn’t get out of my mind from that dread-filled Tuesday morning—and still can’t get out of my mind more than a week later—is the image of the second plane, turning round and flying directly into the 110-story building, setting it instantly aflame. So insane, so like a comic book, did the picture of the plane crashing into the building seem, that I quite expected to see King Kong atop the tower. I rather wished I had, so that I would know I was watching a piece of crude science fiction. No such luck. I was stunned but not shocked, depressed but not demoralized by the events of that long day. The reason is that, completely unworked out though my personal theology is, it has always included a prominent place for evil. I happen to believe that any group of people who can talk others into giving up their lives to murder innocents comes as close to qualifying as evil as anything I know. Still, as I watched the proceedings on Tuesday, September 11, the overwhelming fact was the innocence of those killed. That is what I couldn’t shake from my mind. For years I have read in the New York Times about vast numbers of people being wiped out in a flood in Bangladesh, or a drought in Ethiopia, or an earthquake in Central America, and not allowed myself to dwell on the ghastliness of such events. I turned away from them as quickly as possible, not, I prefer to think, from a failure of imagination but from the possession of all too vivid—and slightly squeamish—an imagination. The killings of September 11 constituted another such event, with two exceptional facts added: that these deaths resulted from acts not of God but of men, and that in this instance it wasn’t possible to turn away. Death in its various forms—slow, quick, painful, merciful, even accidental—is not usually difficult to imagine. These deaths, though, are. Solipsistically, I see myself, a cup of coffee at my desk, my computer just booted up, ready to make an attack on the day, when I hear a shattering boom, see flame, and darkness—oblivion. I shy away from thinking about death of the kind visited upon those in the four hijacked planes, who had time for the terror to sink in. One reads the lists of the dead and feels the defeat of so many plans and dreams. A young couple with its 2-year-old child crash in Pennsylvania, two firemen brothers are crushed in lower Manhattan, a former model who had nursed a now dead moviestar husband through AIDS is used as fodder to destroy a building. All victims of a vicious political game in which they had no knowledge they were enrolled as players. After the first day, I rationed my television watching. Among people not personally affected, depression, I noted, hit hardest those who couldn’t pull themselves away from their television sets. Ceaseless contemplation of the gray rubble, empty reports from journalists (“Back to you, Tom, Peter, Dan”), clarified nothing, but only deepened despair. I wanted hard news: numbers of survivors, numbers of dead, firm facts leading to knowledge of who brought about this sorrow. I found myself taking solace from the memorial service at the National Cathedral, its dignity and beautiful music and measured speech, and was pleased to see the president come through so admirably by speaking so well. What I especially wanted to avoid was television interviews with people who were waiting to discover if they had lost family. I wanted them left alone. One evening I watched the man who owned the restaurant at the World Trade Center called Windows on the World and who had lost 55 members of his staff break down and weep before the already dampened microphone of Barbara Walters. Why did the man agree to be interviewed? Why does anyone who lost family and friends? The obscenity of modern television journalism was therein once more revealed, but its mysterious attraction even to the victimized remains unsolved. I clicked off the television. “We don’t have a precedent for anything like this,” noted a psychiatrist at the post-traumatic stress program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Nor do we have language for it. We long ago used up carnage and atrocity and catastrophe. The day of the crashes, television commentators gave horrific a good workout, and by afternoon the juju had departed that word, too. Thomas Friedman, in his column in the New York Times, reported that a secretary in Jordan, not having much English, had called the events of September 11 “the Big Terrible.” I don’t myself have the language to put what happened into any sort of useful order or perspective, and language is my game, just about all I have and am. All I come away with is a heightened realization of the easy violability of life when it is held so cheap by enemies and my own selfish good fortune in having thus far been spared a death devoid of natural cause or rational meaning.
