My brother is flying in tonight for a visit. It’s his way of reclaiming Nine-Eleven. He’s done it several times now.
Reclaiming Nine-Eleven
“Took my chances on a big jet plane
Never let ’em tell you that they’re all the same”
Led Zeppelin “Going to California”
My brother is flying in tonight for a visit. It’s his way of reclaiming Nine-Eleven. He’s done it several times now. I admire his spirit. He has not forgotten what happened 23 years ago but treats it more like a old scar than a scabbed over wound that is slowly healing. I am still moved reading once more to transcripts from passengers on United Flight 93 and the pictures of the terrible devastation in New York.
I came across an essay by Jonathan Rosen on “What September 11 Revealed” that included a link to talk by Vincent Scully four days after 9-11. Here is a key passage I found moving:
“When a very conspicuous building in our city, which we expect to outlive us, is destroyed by enemy action, then it’s not only the lives of the people who are lost in it, but the lives of all of us, and the hope of future life which is cut away. And they know it. They know what they are doing.”
Vincent Scully in closing remarks for a Sep-15-2001 symposium on architecture at Yale ‘White, Gray, and Blue.“
In the end the hijackers did not cut away our hopes for the future, we have persevered. We remember but move forward.
Light a candle, yes. But also drive a rivet.
I had thought about 9/11 when I got up. […]
Remember.
But move forward, too. Light a candle, yes. But also drive a rivet.
The block is old enough to have suffered the first wave of Dutch Elm Disease, years ago. You can tell: the south end of the block is still a little light on foliage. You can tell: now and then a square of sidewalk has a circular indentation that marks the spot where once a massive ancient elm trunk stood. The tree’s gone; the accommodation remains. Even the stump has faded back into the earth.
There are three giant elms on the block. Two wear the fatal orange stripe, indicating they have been infected. One’s on the east side, one’s one the west. They are the tent poles around which the party lights are wound. In the next few months the crews will arrive and bring them down. Three days, at most – one to shave the fractal branches, one to carve the thick limbs, one to sunder the trunk and feed it to the chipper.
“How are we going to string the lights next year?” my old next-door neighbor wondered as we discussed the plight of the trees. He shrugged and took a pull off his beer.
“We’ll figure out something,” he said.
Then we had burgers and chips and beer and watched the children run and laugh in the shadows. Is it too much to believe it will be this good next year? No. And that’s something
Hell, that’s everything.
Closing paragraphs from a long post that James Lileks wrote on Sep-13-2004 looking back on 9/11.
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Image Credit: Cover of New Yorker from Sep-24-2001 (drawn by Art Speigelman)