Ironically, the twin towers of the World Trade Center never made much of an impression on me. They were too big, too bland, too boring. Brutal, even. Boxy, scaleless, graceless, they defined the skyline without enhancing it. For me the iconic skyscrapers were always the Empire State Building and, to a lesser extent, the Chrysler building. When emerging from the subway it was the Empire State Building I looked to orient by. When I was downtown I sometimes noticed the tops of the Trade Center looming over the surrounding buildings, but they were more like some ugly pair of mountains than anything else: distant, dark, impassive. Although I had visited Battery Park I never went in the buildings; never saw the view from the roof or dined at Windows on the World. I was never across the Hudson, so that famous WTC-punctuated skyline was never a cherished memory. And yet, I could see them in my mind’s eye, from across that river, from the air, from angles I had never seen, from places I'd never been. Thanks to television and movies, those towers were part of my memory, part of all of our collective consciousness. America has always been as much an ideal and a vision as a real country, a place alive in myth and yearning, in the imagination of all those who live there and all those all over the world who ever wish to. And New York was always the capitol of that imaginary America: its streets populated with golden-hearted Irish cops and tough-talking Mafiosi, with smart-alec paper boys and quarter-tossing pinstriped bankers, with sharp-eyed reporters and wise-assed construction workers, with baggy-pants rappers and watch-capped graffiti artists and black-hatted Hassidim and the kids from “Rent” and “Fame” and every person with a book in their heads or a song in their hearts or a dance step in their feet and a dream of opening on Broadway. The New York of these dreams, the streets that held up those aspirations, had a skyline; and in the center of it was the World Trade Center. In the dream Lady Liberty might open her arms to all of us; but her eyes were on that skyline, on those towers. And she directed our eyes there too: from “Barney Miller” to “Sex in the City,” from “Wall Street” to “Working Girl” to “The Sopranos,” we saw them and knew them and all they represented. Whether we’d been to the real New York or not, whether we aspired to live there or visit or even to stay away from all it represented, the city was always a place that occupied substantive psychic real estate: footed by the subways, girdled by Central Park, and crowned by those skyscrapers. It might be “Next year, in Jerusalem” but it was always “Someday in New York.” Yes: it was always Someday in New York. And whether that Someday ever came for us, whether we ever really got to that city or not, it was enough to know that it existed.
And now a very big part of it doesn’t. September 11 was a Someday that came, and left, and took so much with it.
I fear in the coming decades we will look back at the 90s in much the way we have always looked back at the 20s: a fin de siecle golden age of giddy good fortune, of naïve parties and celebrated trivia, of unbounded enthusiasm and irrational speculation. We have moved into a new, more sober time. The dimensions of this time are not clear, and won’t be for years. But already we know the tone is darker, more serious. Hope is not gone, but hype is surely no longer appropriate. And whatever comes in the future, what is certainly appropriate now, at this moment, is mourning. Mourning for the lost people, certainly: that awful number magnified by lives lived and all the loved ones left behind: all the siblings and parents, friends and partners, children now fatherless or never to be. But mourning too, by all of us, for that city in our heads forever scarred, forever changed. The city we are losing.
While traveling in the Middle East last summer I took along a couple of books of poetry. One by Rumi, the Sufi mystic; and one by Constantine Cavafy. Greek, Orthodox Christian, and gay, Cavafy lived in Ottoman Turkish Alexandria before World War One, at a time when that city was one of the most cosmopolitan in all the world. Not a financial powerhouse like New York, it was nevertheless similar: a rivermouth port city that welcomed and celebrated art and society. Its cultural diversity was such that Cavafy, triply a minority, felt at home there; and its creative energy propelled his best work. In Cavafy’s time it was a magnetic light shining across the eastern Mediterranean, even if its signature tower had long since fallen into the sea. But that time is now long gone, swept away by war and by the very forces of evil and intolerance that perhaps plotted against New York. Cavafy was very much aware of those forces, and the fragile nature of the tolerant city in which he lived — not least because Alexandria had occupied this position before, in the time of the Caesars, and had been destroyed. So he wrote both about a city that once had been, and a city, a place, a time, that — even as he inhabited it — he feared would soon be gone forever. And, like any great poet, he wrote about all such cities, and all such times; times such as these.
The God Abandons Antony
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don't mourn your luck that's failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive - don't mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don't fool yourself, don't say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don't degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen - your final delectation - to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, the Alexandria you are losing.
-- Constantine P. Cavafy
My deepest sympathies to all who have lost. And my greatest respect and most sincere salute to all the rescuers, the people of New York, and most especially to the city’s firemen. You make me proud to live in America, to have visited New York, and to be a human being.
-- September 12, 2001
