Grave New World

It was a week when words failed us. We sensed ourselves entering some terrible epoch, but we did not have sufficient nouns or verbs.

Foremost among misnomers was the word “terrorism.” The suicidal attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were popularly said to be “acts of terrorism.” But the “terrorists,” if we must call them that, did not leave Americans terrified. Most of us were left, I suspect, in a state closer to shock.

Friends told me of feeling dizzied, waking to the scenes of Tuesday morning. More than a few spoke of nausea and faintness, of shivering on a late summer morning.

The media offered us chatter, non-stop. And the chatter, especially television chatter, kept us warm company. I know several people who said they went to sleep to the voices of television.

But silence intruded at 4 the next morning. American “airspace” over the Pentagon had been violated. A part of our deepest privacy had been violated. That part of our souls where dreams and sleep reside. It is a chamber so deep that we lack more than childish words to explain the shudder.

In lower Manhattan, journalists interviewed weary firemen and rescue workers who were looking for thousands of missing persons. “You don’t want to hear,” one fireman said, refusing to tell us what he had seen in the rubble.

Beyond the terrible weight of so many deaths, the destruction of the New York City skyline may have cut even more deeply than we know how to say.

For most of us, New York City is not any longer, in any true sense, the “center” of America. Except in one enduring sense: Manhattan’s skyline remains the best symbol of the scale of American ambition, our garish dreams and daring, the nation’s soaring achievement.

Seeing those twin towers under attack, then collapsing, seeing clouds of dust fill the famous downtown canyons, left us astonished. Besides thousands of real lives lost, what was destroyed was a symbol of America, a symbol deeper than words.

Not coincidentally, mayors and governors all over the country immediately feared that what was most vulnerable to attack on Tuesday was not the prosaic, but the architecture of our dream life--Walt Disney World, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Sears Tower.

And at one of the week’s most telling press conferences, the New York City mayor and the state’s governor and two senators reassured the city and the nation that the World Trade Center would be rebuilt, defying the violent act of erasure.

In that same spirit, rescue workers reacted negatively when asked by reporters if the gaping lot of twisted steel and concrete should be preserved as a park. “Rebuild,” they said.

The daytime question this week--the question of grammar school teachers and psychologists and television commentators, the question for an old world was: What shall we tell our children?

But there is not another generation of American children--not even generations of children in past world wars--that has been so schooled by Hollywood and Nintendo games to imagine catastrophic explosions and the thrill of apocalypse. The better question might be: What shall our children tell us?

In a week during which there was so little to say, friends of mine argued over whether President Bush, never an elegant orator under the best of circumstances, “sounded” presidential enough or looked confident enough, was calming or determined enough.

The president’s greatest eloquence turned out to be the moment his voice broke and grief flooded a sentence.

Beyond that, what everyone remembered hearing the president say was the terrible little noun “war.” The word hung in the air all week, but the longer it did, the clearer it became that no one in official Washington was speaking of war, as other generations spoke of war.

In such a week, we held onto proper names. The names of the dead trailed night and day across our television screens, to help us gauge the enormity of the loss, and also to heal our grief at the loss. Lives were lost, but we had names.

One was also grateful when journalists and government officials were able to give Evil proper names. Within hours of the explosions, we knew the names of some hijackers. And then the names of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein surfaced to give us the confidence that our government did, after all, have control of the narrative line.

But did we? Who could not wonder as we watched Palestinian women on the West Bank, like mad psalmists, trilling their glee in front of their sons.

By week’s end, a question remained about the men who had commandeered the four airplanes. Beyond knowing who they were--their names and their nations of origin--stood the nagging question about the depth of their hatred for us. No one in Washington seemed able to answer “Why.” The nation was forced to settle for “Who.”

One of the strangest things that happens during periods of terrorism is that the citizenry often becomes calm. In the face of uncertainty, people turn resolute. People insist on the supremacy of the mundane over the extraordinary.

I remember living in London in the early 1970s. I remember London during a particularly violent campaign of the Irish Republican Army. I remember the capital resolute.

People seemed madly, wonderfully determined to shop at Harrods, go to the theater, to walk, to stand in crowds, to fill in the blanks of the crossword puzzle.

All this week I sensed the same determination across America--friends and strangers spoke of their desire to resume a routine. I sensed it in myself. Even on Tuesday, after I saw people fall through the sky and buildings collapse, erasing the skyline, I was determined to change my bed sheets.

But, of course, despite the assurances we give ourselves now that life is “returning to normal,” what we now must question is the idea of the normal.

Americans seem to be facing that prospect of the abnormal with quiet and generosity. All week long, they seemed to feel closest when they were acting kindly to one another--at the rescue sites in New York City or on blood lines. The nation seemed bonded by the quiet experience of a common hurt, rather than by a common, noisy rage.

The president, I think, is going to need to galvanize some dark anger, yet unspoken, to enlist us in a complicated military retaliation. But the question I have is whether his words will be able to fill in the gaps.

In the meanwhile, the most important conversation becomes the one we have with ourselves. It is a conversation about risk and caution. Should I take that plane trip I’ve scheduled for next week? Do I really want to take that new job in a skyscraper? Do I want to sit in a crowded movie theater?

Such questions announce our new age. We are going to ask ourselves many such questions in the future.