I try not to collect paper things, like books and magazines. But the convenience of a newspaper or a book trumps the conviction, which seeks to save trees and reduce moldering trash. A computer, although it runs on petroleum-fired electricity, has a central repository accessible to many users connected to a server. As I more and more trust this continuing fact, I have even bought books electronically. Magazine subscriptions allow me to tap into article archives, some more than a century old. But, I keep a paper copy of The Economist’s 9/11 issue.

 

9/11 is the day when all those stubborn human qualities, like messiness and impermanence, collided with our over-reaching ambitions. Difference confounded universality, and emotion trampled disinterested judgment. Ugliness and beauty intermingled in the twisted metal, where so many firefighters and police officers perished. 9/11 is a day, when one knows what living requires. It is a day I want to cherish.

 

I recall my wife‘s voice. She had retreated to a sanctuary in a her parent’s apartment from the tension hanging in the air of our room. I was alone and asleep, when a Canadian friend telephoned me to inform me of a news report on the television. In an irritated stupor, I watched repeatedly as an airplane struck the nondescript silver building. I have no attachment to New York. The sheer willfulness of a machine, guided by a fellow human being, actually doing that which it is expressly not designed to do, reduced me to a nothingness pregnant with a surprising hope. I stumbled in the witching hour gloom, which seemed to me moonless, to the room where my wife was lying asleep and alone. I embraced her awkwardly, and then fully. I could never again sleep alone.

 

Radiating from Ground Zero is a continuous shock wave of emptiness and a constant reminder of mortality. Tourists flocking to the pit left by the scooped-out rubble swear all their prying glances are part of a pilgrimage. Half a century after Martin Heidegger wrote Being and Time, Americans understand what he meant by groundlessness. Four airplanes and thousands of deaths after the Holocaust, and now, in the twenty-first century Americans are pop existentialists. By putting a name on what is not there, but yet so intriguing to us, we seek to render safe what we cannot and do not want to comprehend. Instinctively we seek solace in memorials, where we absorb the past in photographs, just as if they were the people who disappeared that day.

 

9/11 is also a political act that many people have ritualized for different reasons. For some (and not just a few Muslims) it is an act of desperate defiance spurred by the hope one action will give meaning to a lifetime of suffering. I do not doubt the terrorists’ motives, nor do I applaud them. I only acknowledge that they are more human for their deed than most of us in our calm reflection. But I have no good feeling for a single Korean, or other punk, who cheers on a murderer like it were a weekend soccer game. I even accept the reflexive inclination of those, who seek revenge, though, I must admit, the soul that forgives is the first person I mistrust. The total effect of 9/11 might stun, but it is no more different than the bombing of Hiroshima or a domestic argument. The only way to make peace with Ground Zero is to accept our own depravity.

 

Fortunately for our comfortable, animal existence, humans only do these such immensely horrible things rarely. But, we should not be surprised nor make a museum of this spectacle. We should absorb the shockwaves, like shards of mirror, into our reflections. From what part of our bodies comes our actions? Are we people running to re-discover our inner monsters? Something more enlightened? Something small and human? Let us pause the next time, not to pray nor remember, but to stop ourselves from acting merely human.

 

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Kicking in Darkness, To Bleed Daylight