But only briefly
The end of civilization.
TO RETURN IN memory to that beautiful blue morning is to visit a lost country, a place as beloved as it is gone. The first thing to recall is how alike we Americans were in what we felt that day. Only months before, in the acrimonious aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, the nation had seemed so divided. It would seem so again. But during the hours of Sept. 11, 2001, we were brought together as we hadn't been in years, a people bound by fear and trembling. What a few saw in person, and what the vast population saw on television, was a glimpse of the human future to which, ordinarily, we are willfully blind.
It is important to distinguish between the event and the interpretation of it. The experience of 9/11 was one thing, the meanings imposed upon it afterward are another. Those meanings ("the clash of civilizations"; a Manichaean good-evil polarity; the rule of law versus the rush to war; blood for oil; imperial hubris or democracy now; Israel as cause or effect) are in dispute. America's enemy has triumphed already in the way Americans regard one another as enemies.
Abstracting from such painfully contested interpretations, can we return to the event that set all of this in motion? Today, can we leave the conflict aside to ask, Why was this nation's first reaction to the catastrophe of New York-Washington-Pennsylvania defined by the empathy we felt for one another? Indeed, empathy that day was nearly universal, including much of the world's instant identification with American anguish. Before we knew anything about Al Qaeda, bin Laden, the Cheney-Wolfowitz war plan, the new threat of global terrorism, the axis of evil -- the most important aspect of the event had already occurred. This aspect, however, the interpretations would ignore.
Some (including me) have said that an inch below the surface of our horrified reaction was a long-standing but subliminal dread of a nuclear war, as if the smoke above Ground Zero were a mushroom cloud, the Manhattan Project come at last to Manhattan. Soon enough, nuclear preoccupation (Iraq's WMD, Iran's enriched uranium, North Korea's bomb) would define the national purpose (with the United States renewing its own nuclear weapons program).
But I believe now that the immediate trauma Americans experienced that first morning was still more primitive than that. Beyond politics, beyond nationality even, what humans saw in that flash was a glimpse of nothing less than the end of the world. Here is the final meaning of the name ``World Trade Center" -- what happened that day was a world-event, almost certainly the first fully realized one in history. The collapse of the Twin Towers on themselves was a manifestation of the radical contingency of the human project itself. The terrorists were mere instruments of this world-historic destruction, far exceeding as it did any outcome they could have imagined. Their purposes were mundane, even irrelevant, when compared to the transcendent epiphany that resulted from the unprecedented combination of venality, accident, technological innovation, and instantaneous global communication.
What did we see? Not merely the end of the majestic towers, although their majesty was essential to what we saw. Not merely the mortality of those men and women whose bodies could be glimpsed in free fall (hemlines and neckties fluttering), although their mortality was absolute. We saw the stunning courage of a legion of heroes, rushing right before our eyes into selfless jeopardy, and we saw, finally, how such heroism was futile. In that destruction, we saw the destruction of the mainspring of meaning and hope -- not the clash of civilization, but the end of it. This was more than a sense of individual mortality, the sure knowledge of a coming death that each one carries. We humans live with that by assuming the open-ended continuation of other lives, our children and their children -- on into the indefinite future. But on 9/11, we saw the future itself as mortal.
In that vision, all that ordinarily separates humans was instantly ash. With the future ripped away from us, there was only the present. For a moment, we stopped struggling against time, and entered its most sovereign province, also known as providence. If all things will cease to exist, then the wonder is that they exist right now. With the fateful indifference of history so instantaneously clear, the human rejection of such indifference loomed as the magnificent exception. So, of course, we turned toward one another -- what else to call it? -- in love.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
