SEPTEMBER 11: A View From Brooklyn
By Christopher Tinney ‘95It’s impossible to write about September 11 without considering the ensuing graphomania and the fragility of context at a time when events could develop at a mind-blowing pace. But the storyteller benefits as much as the audience —it is I who squeezes comfort and meaning out of one more essay. And no one disputes the immortality of that Tuesday’s horrific images.
For me, the day has fused into a collage of scenes framed by our Brooklyn windows and punctuated by the fire escape ladder: a neighbor sobbing on the sidewalk; thousands of memos and office records swirling above the East River, reflecting a beautiful day’s sun as if they were sheets of foil; a child chasing after the charred papers as they fell to the ground; Manhattan completely shrouded in smoke after the slow-motion collapse of the South Tower; white fluff and dust falling from a black sky, coating the cars and trees; a man in a suit and tie walking through the debris storm with a black umbrella; the conspicuous silence of car stereos; and, in the end, after the smoke began to clear late that afternoon, the appearance of what seemed like new buildings on the skyline. Buildings we’d failed to notice before because our eyes had been trained to see southern Manhattan in a certain way, because our two focal points —our frames of reference —were gone.
As overwhelmed as my girlfriend, Carolyn, and I were by the media coverage, it still took us nearly a week to turn off the televison. It took us that long to realize we weren’t starved for updates and commentary so much as we were clinging to each other on the couch, trying to force this tragedy into a box and demand that it make sense of itself. We were searching then as we are now for meaning.
In their own ways, people around the world are erecting monuments and joining in a community effort to create beauty from sadness. The mix of a thousand scented candles in Union Square, the poems posted on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, and the American flags taped on delivery truck antennas reflect more than a sense of mourning, loss, and patriotism. They are also a testament to our need to create or find meaning —not only in the heartbreaking loss of many lives, but also in our own. When we volunteer our time and donate money, we are in part fighting off an old monster with which some of us may before have been unfamiliar —a sense of futility.
As I often do, I turned to literature for comfort and inspiration, and I considered as well the increasing relevance of a lecture given a few years ago by philosophy professor Stephen Emmanuel. Among other things, he questioned the value of books that celebrate a kind of bleak cynicism, books that originate in and return sneeringly to nihilism. Though I at first took issue with this, time and a lot more reading have changed my mind. To put it another way, writer David Foster Wallace says, “we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction (or movies or political commentary) that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what ’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.”
Now, as we again and in desperation confront the fragility and preciousness of human life, these sentiments, I think, assume a new profundity. It’s up to us, as we emerge from mourning and fear and bitterness, to focus on and revive all things magical in our lives, including the eternal search for and creation of meaning. It doesn’t matter if we have labels for these things or prefer to leave them unnamed. If the meaning of life is bestowed from within and not without, then it is the resilience and creativity with which we transcend horrors and not the horrors themselves that define our lives. It’s what helped many New Yorkers make it through those first days and what keeps everyone getting out of bed and living their lives, with hope and faith and love and determination —perhaps even obstinance. While we may never have the ability to make sense of everything, we are, I believe, charged with a renewed and profound responsibility —to ourselves, to our communities, to humanity.