Ground Zero, November, 2011

Our local independent bookstore features literary quotations written high on its walls.  My favorite is from Logan Pearsall Smith, an early twentieth century writer: “People say life’s the thing, but I prefer reading.”  I wouldn’t go that far, but I think life is often enhanced by reading while living.  When I travel, for example, I seek out both fiction and non-fiction about my destination before and during the trip.

Two weeks ago, I experienced an almost perfect symbiosis of life and reading.  Visiting New York for a board meeting of Facing History and Ourselves, which was to begin with a visit to Ground Zero, I took along a novel that enriched an already profound experience.

Because of Facing History’s reputation and its many supporters, we were given exceptional access to the site, including a talk by the director of the National September 11^th Museum, and a tour of the memorial with him as our guide.  Next we were privileged to participate in a small group conversation with architect Michael Arad, the designer of the “Reflecting Absence” pools that occupy the site of each tower.

Every part of this event was simultaneously painful, and, in a sense, uplifting. Museum director Lee Ielpi, a retired New York fireman whose firefighter son died on 9/11, introduced us to the mementoes people retrieved from the site and donated to the museum.  One in particular struck me: an investment manager who had located the small set of bilingual dictionaries he had used for his work, and who said he donated them as a reminder of the need for all peoples to understand each other.  Among the quotations painted on the museum’s pillars and walls, I read with a shudder both of shock and of admiration for their power, these words of the poet Hettie Jones: “We are breathing the dead, taking them into our lungs as living we had taken into our arms.”

Mr. Ielpi spoke to us of his son, their last phone call as the young man headed out with his rescue crew, and the three months before his body was discovered.  Throughout the tour he focused not on esthetics and numbers, but on the human beings who perished – and who he always described as “murdered.”  He consistently referred to them as souls, and told us of the 19,000 yet unidentified body parts and the more than 1000 victims as yet unaccounted for.  He told us the remains will be stored below the memorial, and re-examined as DNA research advances, and most movingly, of the special rights families of the missing will have to visit the vaults to be near whatever may remain of their loved ones.

Leaving the museum, we went to a nearby location, where Michael Arad spoke about his design and answered questions.  Arad, who was 34 when he began working on the project, barely looks that age today.  He spoke about the concept for the design, and the many ways he worked on it before ever entering the competition.  (Just before he received the commission, he had been working for New York City designing police stations.)

Above all, Arad’s sensitivity to the meaning of the memorial came through.  The most contentious part of the project had been the inscribing of names.  Some had assumed simple alphabetical order, others had urged that rescuers be separated from other victims, still others that their ages, affiliations, or other information be included.  Arad firmly believed that a name alone should represent each person, and that aside from noting the tower, plane, or other location where people died, and placing police and firefighters in their own groups, there should be only one ordering principle: families should be allowed to request proximity of their loved one to others important to them.  Despite opposition from many who thought the task too complicated, and with Mayor Bloomberg’s support, he persevered, and with enormous care and patience, 1200 specific requests were accommodated.  Some of these were remarkable: partners who had not shared the same last name, best friends, but also some that required ingenuity, such as the young woman who wanted her father, killed on one of the planes, to be near her friend, killed in the towers, or two brothers, one a firefighter, the other a policeman.  In these cases, one of the two is listed as the last person in their section, tower, plane, or rescue group, and the other as the first person in theirs.  That such care was given, even though perhaps only one living person will know, demonstrated a depth of commitment from the living to the dead that was, as I said earlier, inspiring and uplifting, even in the face of grief.

Next blog: the truth of fiction

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            Whenever I read about educating American students so they can “compete and succeed” (usually followed by “in a global marketplace” or some such), I think of a story I once heard about Americans introducing football to Samoa just after World War II.  As the story goes, the Samoans took to football instantly, which seems entirely plausible, given the fact that Samoans are now 56 times more likely to play in the NFL than other Americans (yes, they are Americans). 

            The strange (and admittedly unconfirmed) part, is that the Samoans played with one difference: they played for a significant length of time, and when the score was tied after enough play, they happily stopped, while their U.S. teachers tried to explain that the purpose of the game was for one side to win.

            True?  I’m not at all sure.  But there are many other cases where we know that the European-American view of competition and winning clashed with other cultures’ views of cooperation and sharing.  Think of the Native Americans in Manhattan and elsewhere, who thought they were agreeing to share land and exchange gifts, while the colonists thought they were buying exclusive rights.

            Last week I talked about what it would mean to prepare all children equally by giving them equal access to health care, education, technology, nutrition, and personal safety.  I can’t help but think that, aside from the enormous amount of money that would demand from the wealthy, there is also an underlying fear of truly unleashing millions more highly capable people into American law, business, medicine, and other lucrative fields. 

            That fear assumes that a large majority of these young people would be eager to compete, and to compete for the same things.  But if that were true, would anyone go into the clergy, teaching, social work, health care (other than the highly paid specialties), or any of the hundreds of jobs that do not promise large financial rewards?  We know it’s possible to make people want things they wouldn’t ordinarily – look at the power of marketing and advertising in America today – but the fact that the number of humanities majors has dropped by almost half since 1970, while the number of business majors has risen by almost three-quarters, is only proof that our wants are conditioned, not innate.

            More and more research shows that people, and many of our near and even distant mammalian cousins, are more cooperative than we once thought.  From mirror neurons, which cause us to react biologically as if we are having the same positive or negative experience as someone we are watching, to evidence that people who help others report a greater increase in happiness than those they helped, it is becoming harder than ever to see either nature or ourselves as entirely red in tooth and claw.

            So don’t worry, millionaires and billionaires. Even if every child in America had a clear path to becoming a Donald Trump or a Bill Gates, the majority of us would still be content with entirely different lives, based on entirely different definitions of success.  Frank Lloyd Wright, who worked for a number of them, once said “Many wealthy people are little more than the janitors of their possessions.”  It might be better to be a real janitor, but be in possession of your life.