Today 3 Quarks Daily is exclusively devoted to original reflections on the attacks of exactly five years ago. We thank all our contributors. Their various pieces are listed alphabetically below by author’s last name (and linked) for your browsing convenience:

Eating Our Popcorn While We Weep, by Karen Ballentine

Brief Reflections on 9/11, by Akeel Bilgrami

Years of Bullets, Years of Lead, by Michael Blim

Alienation and Violence in Kashmir, by Shiban Ganju

September Song, by Ruth Kikin-Gill

Islamism’s Watershed Moment, by Alon Levy

Three Ways Out of Iraq, by Ram Mannikalingam

9/11: A fragment of Experience, by Morgan Meis

Whatever: A New York State of Mind, by Peter Nicholson

Empty Liquor Gift-Tins and the Horror of the Magyar Moment, by Jed Palmer

A Short Numerically-Flavored Rumination on 9/11/01, by John Allen Paulos

How We Became Important, by S. Abbas Raza

Remembering the World Trade Center, by S. Asad Raza

Perceptions: 9.11, by Sughra Raza

The Self and September 11, by Justin E. H. Smith

A Note on September 11 Fiction, by J. M. Tyree

Abbas Raza:

Would you say a little bit by way of reflections on September 11 five years later?

Akeel Bilgrami:

It’s hard to say anything about September 11 that hasn’t been said before, but some things need to be said again and again, so I am glad you’ve asked me this. In the first few months after that morning, I, like most other people, spoke an awful lot to friends and acquaintances about how we ought to understand that extraordinary atrocity. The great and spontaneous feelings of sympathy for the victims we all felt were expressed in words, in donations, in trips down to the devastated region to keep small shops and eating places going…. But after some months, I began to notice that many people, even including close friends, were quite incapable (actually that is the wrong word, I should say ‘unwilling’ since these are not helpless tendencies) of showing any parallel sympathy for the very much larger number of people being bombed and killed in Afghanistan –a far greater wrong because that invasion amounted to the virtually total destruction of an already parched and hungry nation. Quite apart from the moral disappointment one feels about this, one can take this chance to reflect (since that is what you asked me to do) in a more general way about our insensitivity to the suffering of people who are not in the immediate vicinity.

Perhaps the first thing to notice about ourselves is that we have tended to respond to September 11 or to the terrorist actions in London and other parts of the world, by simply saying that they are so atrocious and unpardonable that they could not be motivated by any serious political motives or any genuine grievance. But when this is not just too quick and reactive, it is at best obtuse and (perhaps more correctly) at worst, self-serving. The words on the lips of terrorists which complain of the American government’s actions in various parts of the world cannot be wholly beside the point and it is our responsibility to pay attention to them, even as we rightly condemn the terrorist acts as unpardonable. The fact is that the words of complaint and criticism on the lips of terrorists are on the lips of many millions of more people on the street, who are not terrorists at all, but ordinary Muslims who have no great love for the terrorists and in fact would be deeply opposed to them but for the fact that they feel that to be critical of them would be letting the side down and capitulating to America’s direct and indirect state- terrorist actions towards their own people for decades.

Akeel Bilgrami is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanties at Columbia University.

Over the course of Italy’s search to understand its lengthy encounter with domestic terrorism, people began to characterize the period of its florescence and decline as Italy’s “anni di piombo,” its years of the bullet. In English, however, we have the opportunity to accept the direct translation, while adding a second sense of our own. “Piombo” is lead, the element.

These past five years have been the “years of bullets” for peoples subject to successive American wars in the Middle East, and the “years of lead” at home. Bush and his regime have put great lead sinkers in our pockets, and we are drowning in a pool of death, moral and political decay, and debt.

Let us take account of what we have done since 9/11, on this, its fifth “anniversary.” There is something about anniversaries that summons up a reckoning. Then there arises compulsion to cut time into periods. What has happened? When and why did it happen? Where are we now?

What Has Happened?

Between 42,000 and 46,000 Iraq civilians have died since the 2003 invasion, according to recent estimates.

2,260 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, and 19,945 have been wounded. These figures are more precise.

440 non-Afghani soldiers, including 333 U.S. soldiers, have died in Afghanistan from many nations since the beginning of post-9/11 hostilities. The number of U.S. wounded in Afghanistan is 892.

No one is sure any more how many Afghani civilians have died since the post-9/11 war began, interest having dropped off after the 2003 Iraqi war.

2072 wiretap authorizations for foreign intelligence and terrorism surveillance out of 2072 applications were granted in 2005, double the number authorized a decade ago. Since 1993, only 5 applications have been refused. No one knows if this figure represents the total number of taps, given the veil of secrecy drawn over the anti-terror campaign.

The Bush regime has been tracking the phone calls of 350,000 people, both foreign nationals and citizen, that have been culled out of millions of telecommunication intercepts. It has now asked Congress for a law that will allow his government to do legally what it has been doing illegally since 9/11.

25 foreign abductions and renditions, slang for torture, have been documented since 9/11. Amnesty International believes that the final number of abductees will be in the hundreds.

The Congressional Research Office estimates that the cost of the war will have reached $320 billion by now. NBC says the war is costing $200 million a day. Joseph Stiglitz estimates it will cost $2 trillion when all is said and done.

Again, on Afghanistan, no one is keeping close tabs of late, but the war had cost as of September, 2005, $88 billion.

When and Why Did It Happen?

A hard one.

Some say, for very good reason, that it all began when Franklin Roosevelt on his way back from Yalta forged a secret understanding with the Saudi government to provide them with protection in exchange for their oil.

For Osama bin Laden, it was watching Beirut crumble under heavy bombing in 1982.

The first Iraq War in 1991 pretty much put the United States on its way to the present situation.

Bush on September 7 in Georgia says it all began when bin Laden issued a fatwa against the U.S. in 1996.

The 9/11 attack authorized American escalation.

Where Are We Now?

A harder question still. But it feels as if we have passed the mid-point of the play. Duncan and Banquo are dead, the last act has begun, and the prophecies pronounced. Bush’s Malcolm still lives, but Birnam Wood is yet far shy of Dunsinane. Our Macbeth still has blood in his eye: “The war on terrorism more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century. And we’re only in its opening stages,” he said on September 7.

He seems like Macbeth to believe that more death still will save his position:

Time, thou anticipatest my dread exploits:
The flighty purpose never is o’ertook
Unless the deed go with it; from this moment
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand. And even now,
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done:
The castle of Macduff I will surprise;
Seize upon Fife; give to the edge o’ the sword
His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line. No boasting like a fool;
This deed I’ll do before this purpose cool…

Like Macbeth, there will be no pretty ending for our murderous, usurper king.

For us, occasionally vociferous, but mostly silent, even somnolent, the problem is graver. Weighed down by the heavy burdens of guilt, war crimes, disgrace, and economic ruin that threaten to sink us for good, we must stop thinking about 9/11 and start thinking about what went wrong and what we must do to make it right.

Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so. And if I seek to acquire these weapons, I am carrying out a duty. It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would prevent the infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims.
                              –Osama bin Laden, Time magazine, Dec 1998

We have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness. And the surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans. We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.
                              –George W. Bush, September 7, 2003

If I can have nothing to do with the organized violence of the Government, I can have less to do with the unorganized violence of the people. I would prefer to be crushed between the two.
                               –Mahatma Gandhi

Alienation breeds terrorism: so say the experts. Poverty, deprivation, subjugation, discrimination, illiteracy provoke alienation and violence. But, is alienation by itself enough prerequisite? From the example below it seems some other factors are at play. Two communities from the same gene pool and same culture have emerged differently after six hundred years of treading different paths in history.

Kashmir acquired its name after a sage Kashyap who reclaimed the water logged land and settled there with his people about 5000 years ago. Over succeeding centuries it evolved into a seat of Buddhist and Hindu learning and by 1300AD it was a place for scholars and not soldiers. The ethos was of compassion, acceptance and spirituality. Intellectual disputes were settles by debates. The sage was revered more than the king. Wise word was more persuasive that the sword.

And then Kashmir confronted its ‘nine-eleven’ in the persona of a brutal king in 1389AD. Sikander, a fundamentalist zealot, adopted the last name of ‘Butshikan’ because he hated idol worship of the Hindus and proceeded to destroy the culture, religion, music, literature and temples with impunity. Two choices on the table were: convert to Islam or die. Many chose death, some escaped and emigrated but the majority converted to Islam. By the time his reign ended in 1413AD — legend has it– only eleven Hindu Pundit families had managed to survive in the valley of Kashmir. Trained in the thoughts of Upanishads that, “Truth is one, the wise call it by different names” and hence “The world is one family” they were at a loss to come to terms with the notion that Islam and only Islam provided all the answers.

Over next six hundred years with sporadic exodus and attrition their population declined. Kashmir, which had a hundred percent Hindu and Buddhist population, became predominantly an Islamic state.

The Muslim majority of Kashmir has been ill at ease with the secular Indian constitution and has felt alienated for many genuine and perceived reasons. The corrupt politicians and the Indian security forces have added fuel to the fire. The simmer came to boil and culminated in the second ‘nine-eleven’ in 1989, six hundred years after the first: the start of current Islamic militancy. The choice for the Hindus was the repeat of 1389AD: leave or die. 350,000 Pundits were thrown out in a matter of months. Some, who were naïve enough to ignore history stayed back only to face plunder, brutality and murder. Exiled Hindu Pundits – 350.000 of them – struggled and suffered in refugee camps outside Kashmir.

This was the tragic end of an intellectual culture of 5000 years – but not the value system. Without money, food, housing, medicines, do you think they were alienated enough to become terrorists? Here is the answer: in the last seventeen years, from 1989 to 2006, Kashmiri Pundit community, having lost everything, living in subhuman deprivation has not produced a single terrorist. Not one. In fact, in the last 600 years they have not cultivated a single militant.

Here is the question: how is it, two communities from the same gene pool, same cultural background of 5000 years, both alienated for one reason or the other in the recent past, choose different paths to solve similar problems?

Therein may lay some answer to solve prevailing violent mindset of nations and communities.

We can bicker about whether 9/11 changed anything substantial in the politics of the West, but there is no doubt that in the Islamic world, especially among unassimilated Muslim minorities in non-Muslim-majority countries, it really did change everything. The attacks, and the American retaliation in Afghanistan, will probably turn out to have been as definitive in the history of political Islam as the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Just as the Iranian Revolution produced a regime based on Islamism, catapulting the ideology into the Middle Eastern mainstream, so has Bin Laden’s attack made his ideology respectable among alienated Muslims, inspiring a small minority of them to commit their own terrorist attacks.

In 1999, Bin Laden was a wanted terrorist who could blow up relatively unimportant American targets and who was best-known to the CIA and other intelligence organizations. In 2004, he was a notorious figure who symbolized Islamism and anti-Americanism and who could inspire attacks independent of his own network. 9/11 was the work of Bin Laden’s people; the Bali bombing was the work of a regional affiliate; the Madrid bombing and the two London bombings were the works of local extremists inspired by Bin Laden but not affiliated with his organization.

Bin Laden’s own organization might have been able to carry out its own attacks instead of merely inspire them had the United States not crippled it in the months following 9/11. There is much to be criticized about the way Bush handled the invasion of Afghanistan, but it did in fact succeed in preventing Bin Laden’s operatives from striking. Its main failures were mishandling the political aftermath of the Taliban’s fall, and failing to achieve a psychological victory by killing or capturing Bin Laden.

Al Qaida has then become more of an ideology than a real organization. Bin Laden’s influence extends as far as his tapes go, just like a radical writer’s influence extends as far as his articles and books go.

Writing about 9/11 a year ago, I noted that post-2001 Islamic extremism didn’t work as a military hierarchy so much as as a university biology department, where every professor runs his own lab. In fact, a better analogy would involve an anarchist cell: the Jihadists may have leaders, but ultimately their cell structure is spontaneous, and although there is an overarching Islamistic goal, the immediate goal is to cause mayhem rather than achieve something concrete.

In fact, like anarchism, Islamism has specific goals. First, it wants foreign influence expunged from the Islamic world, especially American military presence but also Western cultural influence. Second, it wants to establish Muslim theocracies in Muslim countries. Third, it wants to subject Muslims worldwide to traditional religious authority. Some visionaries may look forward to a unified Ummah, or even to spreading Islam throughout the world, but most Jihadists have a distinctly local character.

Bin Laden’s distinguishing feature is his global outlook. Al Qaida the organization and Hezbollah are the only two Islamist terrorist groups that operate globally rather than locally. With the severe blow it suffered, Al Qaida is now forced to operate as a distributed network based on shared values rather than as a single hierarchy; however, it merely outsourced its global outlook to local groups.

However, this movement is still more about frustration and violence than about social change. This is what differentiates extremist groups that focus on welfare operations and gaining political support for reactionary legislation, such as Hezbollah, from extremist groups that focus on killing people, such as the Al Qaida movement. Social movements, even violent ones, tend to draw inspiration from events showcasing their own oppression – in the case of Islamism, the War on Iraq could be such an event. But in fact the Al Qaida movement’s main source of inspiration is 9/11, not Iraq; its defiant figure is Bin Laden, not Saddam Hussein. While the origin of this movement is largely in the oppression of Muslims in Europe, the focus is not so much on the oppression as on the fundamentalism it bred.

There is a reason all of these developments have only happened in the last five years. There was plenty of alienation around earlier, and both Britain and France have been harboring Islamist extremists for decades. But up until 9/11/2001, there was no inspiration for violent action, just as before Rosa Parks defied bus segregation, there was no inspiration in the American South for non-violent direct action.

Ordinarily, terrorism aims to engage in spectacular action in order to evoke fear among members of the terrorized group. This is especially true for factional terrorism, which cannot engage in large-scale massacres the way state terrorism can. In that traditional goal, Bin Laden has certainly succeeded, for Americans fear terrorism far more than social ills that kill an order of magnitude more people. But he has also succeeded in a nontraditional goal, in that he got a reputation of someone who could bring America down, and destroy its essential symbols. It does not matter that the actual attack was spectacular but did not kill that many people; when it comes to ideological grandstanding, perception is reality.

Still, in many respects, the 9/11 attacks did not completely change the character of Islamism. As I mentioned before, it remains primarily local. All Islamists hate the United States, considering it the symbol of all that is evil in the world. But British Jihadists evidently blow up the London Underground instead of traveling to New York and blowing up subway stations; even Iraqi Jihadists, including foreign fighters inspired by anti-Americanism, concentrate more on killing Iraqis of the wrong denomination than on killing Americans.

And two possible trends that would have made the attacks even more of a watershed moment did not occur. It was entirely possible for the attacks to scar not the vast majority of Muslims, but a near-unanimous one. In such a case, the focus of Muslim cultural identity in Europe may have been greater integration, despite Europe’s uniformly integration-discouraging governmental policies; any radical fringe could have then turned to non-violent direct action. I suspect a big reason this trend did not happen is Bush’s virulent response, and governments’ not cracking down on subsequent anti-Muslim hate crimes, but it could have also been due to other reasons, such as the lack of a civic tradition in Islam.

The other possible trend is massive radicalization. At present, the most biased neoconservatives say that 1% of all Muslims are Jihadists; the American response, combined with overt racism in Western countries, could have easily turned that number to 15%. The clash of civilizations fundamentalists on both sides have been hoping for did not happen, is not happening, and will almost certainly not happen. Even Samuel Huntington’s more denouement-based conception of a clash of civilizations has not materialized.

So in fact, 9/11 did not change the level of support Jihadi extremism enjoyed among Muslims. Its significance lies in changing the nature of that support, from merely hating the West and being drawn to fundamentalism as a reaction, to admiring and seeking to emulate Bin Laden. In that respect, it really did change everything in the Islamic world, for never before had there been a coherent violent Islamist ideology. Even if that ideology is still based on its believers’ cultural isolation and oppression, it is still an ideology that serves as inspiration to many extremists. And certainly, this is an ideology that only rose after the watershed moment of Islamism that was 9/11.

September in Tel Aviv is never easy. The heat competes with the humidity, and even with air-conditioning, it feels as if the weather is closing in on us. But in 2001 it wasn’t only the weather that was hard to cope with. A torrent of terror attacks all over the country contributed to the distressed and heavy atmosphere, and made it even harder to breathe.

By the hour, the whole country would tune in to the radio, to keep up with the latest events. A routine of twenty-four daily news broadcasts, on every possible wavelength. Being the computer geeks that we were, we usually topped it up with frequent glances at on-line newspapers, just in case some disaster had happened while we weren’t listening. And sadly, tragedies did happen more often than anyone had wished for.

September’s melancholy was a major reason why Erez and I decided to take a break from everything and set off to Barcelona. Sort of “when the going gets tough, the tough are going away” strategy. We booked tickets for September 13th.

Early afternoon at work, everyone in my design consultancy was busy as usual when someone shouted something about crazy happenings in New York and that we should turn on the T.V. It was hard to believe what we saw. Here’s a plane crashing into a tower. And another one. And the first tower thunders down, and then the second. And things changed forever.

The next two days saw me glued to the internet, with the T.V. as a backup, watching the harsh pictures over and over again – the plane-crashes, the collapsing towers, the falling people, the dust over the city, and the ashes in people’s eyes. And the words. Endless piles of words. Coming from the mouths of million experts who tried to explain what has happened, and why. I’ve learned a whole new vocabulary of terms and names in those days. Words I still wish I hadn’t known.

Meanwhile, all the flights were cancelled. We didn’t know if we’ll be able to leave on our vacation. It sounds cold and selfish, I know, but in a way, the horrible events in America just made it more urgent to get away from everything. To relieve the stress that until that moment was local, and from this point onward became global.

Two days later, at the airport, I wasn’t so sure about getting on the plane. It felt spooky, it felt dangerous, not the getaway I had in mind. Security measures, which are always strict at TLV, seemed more meticulous than ever. Endless queues stretched at the check-in counters due to delayed and cancelled flights, and confused passengers were everywhere. And inside, a sense of guilt was gnawing, eating away the excitement of the journey. Is it ok to indulge on a sunny beach while others are suffering in ashen cities? Am I immoral? And if I wouldn’t go, would it change anything in the worldly order? Maybe not, but it might have changed my life, as Erez proposed to me in Barcelona.

This year, on 9/11 we will be landing in Israel, on a short family visit before relocating from gloomy London, where we lived in the past year, to sunny California, which will be our next home, at least for a while. In Heathrow, each of us will be restricted to carrying only one small hand bag to the plane, and I will have to taste the milk I’m carrying for my baby, to prove it is not a liquid explosive.

When we’ll arrive, I don’t expect the weather in Israel to be any different than it was five years ago. Sadly, I also realize that nothing much has changed in the political climate either. We will drive away from the airport and into the city, while outside the car, the heat will continue to compete with the humidity, and though the air-conditioning will be turned on, we will still feel the weather closing in on us.

More than any other issue, it is the US invasion of Iraq that has separated the US from the rest of world after September 11th. It has also divided the United States internally, weakened its capacity to deal with the threat of extremist Islamic terror, and made a mockery of US power. While Guantanamo, Afghanistan, limits on civil liberties in the US, and the US acquiescence in Israeli bombing have set the US apart from the rest of the world, how many countries can really say they have not tortured prisoners, bombed innocents, imprisoned their own citizens without just cause, or over-reacted in their efforts to fight insurgencies and rebellions? However, other than the Soviet Union and Iraq, itself, no other country after World War II has had the power or the chutzpah to invade another, simply in order to remake it.

While the US Administration argues that Iraq is a part of the “war on terror”, most critics argue that it is at best distracting the US from dealing with terrorism, or, at worst, destroying its ability to do so. Still, it is hard not to be sympathetic to the project of a democratic pluralist Iraq, however much a mess the US has made of it. Is there a way, in which this US Administration, as opposed to some imaginary one with perfect information and ideal morals, could have achieved, or still can, a more stable Iraq.

Regime change without an invasion

All advocates of invasion also advocated regime change. But all advocates of regime change did not advocate invasion. So this administration could have mobilized a broader coalition, if it had actually implemented what was clear in its political rhetoric and official policy. It formally sought to end Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction, but informally made it clear that it would not settle for anything less than regime change. The problem was the Administration’s insistence that regime change could only be secured through the barrel of a gun. There may have been another option.

Instead of invading on 20th March 2003, the US could have sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad with an ultimatum, two decades after his previous trip to Iraq as a presidential envoy of Ronald Reagan. Rumsfeld could have offered the following deal. Saddam Hussein agrees to an inclusive transitional government, grants formal self-rule to the Kurds, ends human rights abuses, cooperates against Al-Qaeda, and allows in UN inspectors. In exchange, the US would not invade Iraq. With the US forces poised to invade, it would have been an offer that Saddam Hussein would have found hard to refuse. But what if he had? There would be war, certainly no worse than what Iraqis face now. Even if he had stalled after accepting the deal, it would have been the beginning of the end of his autocratic authority.

A different beginning

Having invaded Iraq, what could the US have done differently? First the US could have prevented the looters from looting Iraq. A curfew combined with stringent measures, immediately after the invasion, would have stopped the looting and made Iraq safer. Second the US could have retained the Iraqi Army, an army of conscripts with no personal loyalty to Saddam Hussein, except for certain elite units. Third the US should have retained all former Baathists in professional positions, only “screening out” former Baathists who had committed abuses. Instead the US first expelled them all and then “screened in” former Baathists who had not committed abuses.

The result of such a “screening in” policy was that the entire professional class – university professors, teachers, doctors and engineers – who joined the Baath party simply to get a job were initially excluded from working. They then had to go through a cumbersome process to prove they were innocent before they got their jobs back. This took time, money, and energy on the part of those affected, and kept Iraq from using much needed local talent to reconstruct the country. These three policy decisions required neither new resources, nor prior planning. They only required sensitivity to the ground situation and a political understanding of how people behave under dictatorships and during transitions. Any one of these decisions could have had a significant impact on the post-war situation in Iraq. All three together might have changed the tide.

What can the US do now?

Now the US is facing terrorism, a tough insurgency and a divided Iraq. Bringing Iraq around would require breaking up the problem into three manageable parts. First the US can work with Iran to stabilize the Shia South. This would entail easing pressure on Iran’s civil nuclear program, lifting sanctions and engaging diplomatically, in exchange for better cooperation from Iran in reining in militias and monitoring the borders. Since Iran also has an interest in a stable Iraq over an unstable one, this is not an impossible deal to make. In any case it is unlikely that the UN Security Council will back the US on sanctions against Iran, so the US has little to lose. Of course, if it waits too long, it may also have little to offer.

Second the US can work with the governments of Iraq, Syria, Iran, and even Turkey, to help secure local autonomy and rights for Kurds within each of these countries. The pay off is greater stability in these countries, and more secure borders for all of them. The Kurdish regions in each of these countries, straddling many of the borders, then become better managed and policed, enabling a crackdown on the infiltration of men and arms to the Iraqi insurgency, rather than facilitating it because of unstable borders.

Third the US should negotiate with the ex-Baathist and nationalist insurgents in the central parts of Iraq, while isolating Al-Qaeda elements. This would reduce incentives for cooperation among the different insurgencies, and increase the likelihood of greater stability. To do this, however, the US would have to backtrack from a major plank of its policy after September 11th. It would have to concede that all terrorists are not the same – there are some terrorists you can and should actually talk to. And that Iraq is not just a central part of the war on terrorism, but a country facing a triple transition from Baath party dictatorship to multi-party democracy, US occupation to Iraqi self-rule, and Sunni Arab domination to pluralism. This would not be easy to do.

If this fails withdraw

The loss of international goodwill, the erosion of support in the US, the anger in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and the anguish in Iraq, may make it politically impossible for the US Administration to take the above steps, even if it were ready to concede that Iraq may have nothing to do with the war on terror. This may leave the US, Iraq and the world with no option but a withdrawal from Iraq. Whatever its drawbacks, such a withdrawal is increasingly beginning to look like the least bad option available.

There’s an old theory that says experience in general is structured like trauma. Or, to put it another way, that trauma is merely a special or egregious case of what we suffer every day simply by coming into contact with the world. Much of what happens to us cannot be fully processed right away. It is simply too much. And so, experience gets packed away into memory where it sits, waiting for an occasion, intentional or less so, when it can be retrieved and dealt with. In this way of thinking, we are all a little like Proust, sorting through our vast store of barely acknowledged experiences and trying to make some sense of them the second time around.

It’s entirely possible five years after 9/11 to have a great deal of discussion about what the event really meant and what its repercussions have been. Simply pick up a newspaper or a magazine or turn on the television. But what has receded farther away, perhaps, is the actual experience of the day. That day barely exists anymore. This is well and proper in many ways, some traumas, some experiences, need more time than others. But it is also an odd feeling to know that such an intense experience does sit there latent, within us all, waiting to be tapped some day, like a kind of mental time bomb.

What I remember most about September 11, 2001 was the muted almost graceful way that the towers came down in watching them from the roof of a warehouse in Brooklyn. There was no sound. The flames and the smoke were distant enough that they were merely daubs of grey and licks of orange against blue. The sky was as blue and as bright as it has ever been. The city was as quiet as it has even been, waiting. Blue. And then, calmly, as if resigned both to the laws of nature and to the whims of human action that had conspired against it, the first tower came down. Something in the middle gave way and the top of the building seemed to slide down on itself, like a telescope. And in a few long, measured ticks of the clock it was gone. Just a plume of billowy cotton spreading out from lower Manhattan into the Bay.

Days later the smell of 9/11 became its main impression, an acridity to the air that everyone recognized but didn’t want to name. There was a burning in the eyes and a bad feeling on the skin. But the actual moment of the event itself was, for us in Brooklyn, like the very absence of sensation, a living abstraction and then a terrible waiting for the rush of experience to come crashing in again as it did the next morning when we woke up dumb, because we’d forgotten that all worlds are fragile and we’d forgotten that we were so very fragile too. And five years later we’ve forgotten all of that again, except here and there in little bits, when we remember.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD‘s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

Whatever is sufficient unto the human, with glories and miseries—freedom’s torch, the begging hand, aloneness; skyscrapers rearing with aesthetic delights not from a lesser god; acres of parkland where one can not just imagine (pace John Lennon), but have, Marvell’s ‘green thought in a green shade’.

Of course, New York is magnificent, and New Yorkers know it, though naturally there are some who can only whinge about their magnificence. Citizens of Sydney, used to newbie enthusiasm over the city’s physical attractions, and far from immune to aren’t-we-wonderful self-glorification, know the real thing when we see it. From the Time Warner Center atrium to the trickling fountains at the Frick collection; up at the Cloisters, sequestered from development; down to the colossal energies of Times Square; at tony Park Avenue; through the empty space where the World Trade Center once stood, now waiting, yearning, for its Freedom Tower—Manhattan, Gotham City, stands, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island boroughs surrounding, an epic of social integration (‘Give me your tired, your poor’), a dazzling, perplexing, overwhelming city. With very expensive real estate. And with taxi and bus drivers whose skill in getting through the city’s ceaseless traffic can only be compared to the technique of great ballet dancers. Some long-term residents bemoan the changing character of parts of the city, but for the visitor it’s a case of: there doesn’t go the neighbourhood. Surely New York was never greener, cleaner or more attractive than it is now.

It might very well be a cliche to stand at the top of the Empire State Building. One does not run into Cary Grant waiting for Deborah Kerr, testing the limits of their affair to remember. However, the visual consummation at this height is quite something. Everyone who goes to New York should try to get there. Most New Yorkers will tell you to go on a clear day—you might just see forever—but I think it’s better to go after a rainstorm, when the clouds have partially cleared and are scudding across the sky, which is when I went. The crowds have dispersed and you don’t have to wait too long to get through the security checks. Then, up at that imperial height, where even Central Park is reduced to some olive spinnaker, you can see the whole fantastic panoply of the city lit by shadow and sunlight, the wind a bracing tonic against the tiredness that is likely to overcome you if you’re not careful. Don’t try to conquer too much of New York on your peregrinations. You won’t.

If that experience doesn’t send you to your hotel room somewhat chastened, then I suggest a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art might. The collection there is so awesome in its range of paintings, sculpture, furniture, glassware, armour and ceramics, that one could not begin to do it justice in less than a year of visits. Here is a place so vast that you can make a wrong turn, expecting to be looking at Greek statuary, and end up in a complete Egyptian temple or, taking another staircase, suddenly be confronted by an entire Frank Lloyd Wright room. Well, one can only take in so much art at one time. It was amusing to see people, just like myself, wandering in a slightly hypnotised way through the galleries at the end of the day. We had experienced the phenomenon of nervous attrition by artistic masterpiece. That’s a danger not just at MMA. There are MoMA and the Guggenheim to see too, for starters. The David Smith retrospective was on at the Guggenheim when I was in New York, and it was exciting to be confronted by an oeuvre I knew little about. By the way, the tour guides in the museums are unfailingly instructive and knowledgeable. They teach you so much in the short amount of time they have, and most of their work is voluntary. 

When the gold curtain parts at the Met for five hours of great Wagner singing (Hampson, Heppner, Meier, Pape, Putilin in Parsifal) or you sit in The Belasco for Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing!, its socialism on the right side of the agit-prop dividing line, in the very theatre where the play had its premiere, you can experience a rare theatrical frisson. The grandfather in the Odets’ play throws himself off the roof of the apartment block in which the Berger family live—Ben Gazzara, the original Brick in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, in a fine performance. The hopes of a lifetime perish with a terrible fall from grace. It struck me that we were living through a similar period the play represents. Our dumb celebrity culture, cynicism and irony, our know-nothing knowingness, is different to pre-War New York, but in other ways we are similar. The grandfather’s ideals are under pressure from economic reality, just as we know the reality of torture, war and starvation. New York should confirm us in our ideals too, or at least make us think very hard about what is left of our ideals. Hart Crane invokes the feeling that precedes insight so well in the ecstatic ‘Proem To Brooklyn Bridge’ from The Bridge: ‘O Sleepless as the river under thee, / Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod, / Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend / And of the curveship lend a myth to God.’ I felt these emotions, these links between architecture and human aspiration, many, many times. The Rockefeller Center, for example, no doubt, for some, a worm of predatory capitalism symbolising all that is worst in the oppression of non-Western cultures, struck me as entirely beautiful, its art works, murals and sculpures, from the Manzù door reliefs to the Swarovski crystal installation (but how are they going to clean it?). For a poet the world may be something like a rose, for the scientist something like a machine to be explained. The future must see the uniting of the rose and the machine in culture, in politics, if we are to at long last fulfil the hopes of grandfathers who gave up and jumped off buildings, or poets who disappeared on ocean voyages.

Parts of the planet may well be rotten to the core, but other parts are marvellous. Sure, New York has problems, the major one being the clear social and economic inequalities between some neighbourhoods. On a mundane level, theatre etiquette could do with some sharpening up—the cannonade of coughing I heard through Act One of Tosca was something to behold. But then there are wonders unlike anything else: the rooftop garden vista at the Metropolitan Museum, the Morgan Library with its unique manuscript and art collections (Anne, Branwell, Charlotte and Emily Brontë manuscripts, Mahler’s 5th, an Edgar Allan Poe story et al), approaching the Statue of Liberty at dusk.

True, there are neurotics, jackasses and wannabes about, but you get those everywhere. Repose can be found in many a quiet enclave, whether that be in any of the numerous bookstores, Bryant Park or in the reading rooms of the adjacent New York Public Library (the library had a superb exhibition on—French Book Art of artists and poets in dialogue—when I visited). On the other hand, if people about you is what you want, The Village Voice can tell you about hundreds of events to go to. New York also means jazz, dogs and food—for cheaper eats try the cheeses in Zabar’s or the hamburgers at Nick’s on the Upper West Side. If you’re cashed up, there’s always Le Cirque. Street fairs are a favourite weekend pastime. Large sections of Broadway, or other thoroughfares, are closed off on Sundays and filled with stands from all over, conspiracy theory booths happily mixing with the corn fritters and pashminas.   

However, in the end, you must come to the one defining moment in recent New York history that centres all journeys in this city, and all one’s subjective emotions. Perhaps it is foolish to look for the spirit of this city in one moment or defining event, but I think you can find that New York spirit in a number: 343. That is the number of firefighters and paramedics who died on September 11 as they tried to control the catastrophe. Every death then was tragic, as are all deaths brought about through violence. But what honour was accrued to the city through their actions. People say the ancient myths were an invention to explain the unpredictable behaviour of the gods, but on September 11 there Hercules fought Antaeus. The golden Prometheus at the Rockefeller Center transformed itself at Ground Zero into stupendous courage and heroism. How proud the relatives and friends must be of those who went to their deaths that day trying to save the lives of others.

Next time you hear about New York’s brashness, financial shenanigans, corruption, its callous disregard for your intentions, look more closely. Beneath the harsh surface lies the greatness of the human spirit, in all of its faltering grandeur.   

                                                                  *

            September 11, 2001

You will remember, under brilliant stars,
The shadows of the burning, falling towers,
The kindness and the malice we receive
Or give to others, fortune’s miseries.

What steadfastness eroded skin will keep
In its griefs, inexplicable;
Dark energy can gather for a killing
Though not all joy is taken by cruel dirt.

When it is done, quickly the darkness comes,
Blood and iron’s mistaken enterprise;
Immortal smiles on future summer nights
Shall hold to reason with grasped photographs.

Time may despatch your broken history
And bid the dead eternal recompense—
Their shades surround you in the morning light
Edging through this silence on the ground.

Written 2003

Line 9 references Macbeth Act 1 Scene 7

‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly.’

Lillias White sings ‘Manhattan’ here. 2′ 46”

Shannon has left me.

No, wait. That’s not right. It’s I who’s left her, and I did it a while ago, too.

I sit in a drab apartment on the third floor of a complex off vaci Utca (VAHtsy OOtsa) in Budapest. There is fabric on the walls–scored beige, thick and hard as amphibian skin–and two putty-colored easy chairs, straight out of Super 8, and a coffee table of black-lacquered particle board, and a glass-doored hutch against the wall, also black-lacquered particle board. The tone is set by the single sad decorative effort: two shelves of empty liquor gift-tins, carefully arranged in the hutch: Dewar’s, Johnny Walker Red, Beefeater, Absolut.

Budapest in 2001–surely it’s a different place now, fast as Eastern Europe is these days, fast as it was in those days–is a city so sexy its longtime residents have relegated their constant hard-ons to the drear of daily life. The women are blonde; they have enormous breasts; they wear thongs; and over their thongs they wear filmy tights or tiny skirts. The men are powerful specimens, tall and muscled and preternaturally confident. These men could crush me in the crook of their arm. They are the Dutch, they are the Danish, but unburdened by the weary sophistication–political, social, sexual–of Western Europe. They all must be unbearably good in bed.

And they have discovered the candied bliss of the American shopping mall. Sixty feet away from my front door, just across vaci Utca, is a pristine five-tier retail mecca, replete with indoor vegetation, multi-screen cinemas (a captain’s easy chair for every paying customer), and countless stores selling whorish outfits for pennies, for spare change, forints. Each shopgirl is a dream of womanly abundance. There are fantastic asses everywhere you look. And the eyes–they seem to invite. (Is it my imagination? Almost certainly it is. I am terribly lonely here.) There’s a TGI Friday’s on the north end, first floor. It is my favorite restaurant.

What I mean to say: Budapest is the perfect place to watch the end of the world.

And Shannon has left me.

What destruction we cannot wreak by our own hand, we wreak passively. In the case of love: a thousand miscast glances, the contemptuous homemaking demands of a tyrant (well-suited for a ’50s housewife in high heels), and a precisely limited sexual plan, designed for my pleasure, designed for my pleasure.

We are in Venice, the living, gasping, brackish museum, in a fabulous apartment, in a fabulous palazzo, terra-cotta roofs in every direction. But for me, I am occupied by flirting with the bar girl. Shannon is at my side, doing the International Herald Trib crossword. The bar girl has sensual lips, that priceless Italian insolence, and is pleased to fuel my fantasies. Meanwhile, Shannon ignores it as best she can. There is grocery shopping to be done, and she’s always on the look-out for a provocative blouse to interest me, and she is deeply in love with Venice. She thinks she loves me, too, but in truth I am only a conduit, a way to get her in. And for me, Shannon is a way, was a way, to get me out. Out of Bennington, Vermont, out of the Bush-addled United States, out of a life that bored me. And here we sit, in this Venetian bar, where the bar girl has just walked by and brushed her hand against my shoulder. That insolence, those sensual lips. I’d like to do terrible things to her.

Venice is a small town for expat Americans. When Shannon has taken all she can take, when my contempt, my wandering eyes, my fury at her insufficiency, at my insufficiency, peak, I must find a new place in which to decay. Budapest, Buda-Pest, city on the Danube, where the buildings proudly bear the bullet holes of 1956, where the women, the girls, twitch their bethonged asses like seasoned pros. Budapest is the place to be, baby.

I am inside my apartment, inside my hard beige walls, because my eyes, my fantasies, are bigger than my courage. I’d like to be a player, but let’s get real. I’m too sensitive, too diffident, too weak, to make the necessary moves. At 3 pm, I turn on CNN and watch massive death in real-time. I see the second plane. I see the desperate, brave suicides. I see the towers fall.

What destruction we cannot wreak by our own hand, we wreak passively.

Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, unrelated to the other languages of Central Europe, and as one of the small number of modern European languages which do not belong to the Indo-European language family it has always been of great interest to linguists. It is spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in seven neighboring countries. The Hungarian name for the language is magyar. [–Wikipedia]

Halál. Death.

I do not speak Hungarian. I cannot pronounce Hungarian. For days I wander the mall, the streets, staring at the newspaper photographs of fire and death, halál, captioned and headlined in a language of stacked consonants and inscrutable syllables. I speak to no one.

Two weeks later I move to a new apartment, farther south, away from the mall, the TGI Friday’s, the fulsome bodies of the girls of my sad little dreams. In my new home I do not get CNN, but Fox News. I develop a disturbing relationship with Bill O’Reilly.

The previous occupant of my apartment, the son of my landlord, has left a cardboard box of videotapes, which I sort through in a pathetic attempt to avoid the writing that is, supposedly, my mission. But they are all in magyar, all useless, all but one. It is unlabeled, black, anonymous. It is unmitigated hardcore pornography. It is an Italian import. There is no sensuality here, no insolence, only fucking. Only death.

Thank you, I say. Thank you, whoever you are. This is everything. This is enough.

Five years seems like such a long time ago. Among other things, both my parents were still alive. (Neither is now.) I was not yet married. I had never heard of blogs. I had never been to Finland (a regular destination for me in recent years because of my friend Marko). I had never been harassed by agents of the Department of Homeland Security. There was no Department of Homeland Security. And there was no Patriot Act, the most dangerous, destructive (of civil liberties) and retrogressive piece of legislation in memory, which now holds over every head in this country (specially Muslim and Arab ones) the dark threat of indefinite detention at Guantanamo, without charge or due process.

The thing I remember most clearly about the day of the attacks is speaking to my mother in Karachi at some point. It wasn’t a particularly substantive exchange, but it was nice to hear her voice, and a relief, I imagine, for her to hear mine. For days afterwards one went around as if in a dream. Nothing felt real. The atmosphere in New York City took a long time to return to anything like normal, and during that period one’s emotions remained unpredictable and turbulent. September 11th itself was, of course, the worst. By afternoon of that bright autumn day, my uptown apartment had become a makeshift refugee camp for a number of friends who lived near the World Trade Center, and who could no longer go home. At some point on that day, we all went out en masse to try and get a late lunch, only to find an eerie silence on Broadway. All traffic had been stopped in Manhattan. For some odd reason, the few people present were whispering to each other, if speaking at all. After a while, armored personnel carriers with uniformed soldiers began slowly rolling down the streets, while F-14 Tomcats circled overhead. People in civilian dress carrying submachine guns quietly appeared on the street corners. (Later, I learned they were FBI agents.) It was not clear then if there would be further attacks. One felt like one was in a war zone, and I was reminded of my recurring childhood nightmares after Pakistan’s 1971 war with India. Every little while, someone in our group would suddenly break into tears.

That night, we slept fitfully, gripped by the confusion of sadness, fear, anger. The next day, I managed to collect myself enough to send an email to friends and family expressing some of what I felt. I reproduce that message here:

Hello,

As time elapses, I am more clearly able to identify and articulate what it is that has been making me so sad about this attack. It is this: some cities do not belong to any particular country but are treasures for all people; cosmopolitan and international by nature, they are the repositories of our shared world culture and artistic production, testaments to what is common and binding among diverse peoples, and sources of creative energy. They come to stand for our notions of community and brotherhood. New York has been by far the most magnificent of these world treasures, and it still is today. Here, on every block you will meet people from forty different countries. Here you can speak Urdu with the cab drivers, and Korean at the grocery store. Here, bhangra rhythms and classical sitar mix with calypso and Finnish ambient chants. Here is where mosques and synagogues are separated by no green-lines. Here is where Rodney King’s wish has mostly come true: we do get along. This city is the least provincial; no nationalism flourishes here. It is the most potent fountainhead of intellectual and artistic endeavor. What this mindless attack has done is desecrate and damage the ideals of international community that this city not only symbolizes, but instantiates as fact and lovely example. And it is this desecration which is so devastatingly heart-breaking.

I recall two things: one, the pleasure and awe with which my mother took in the incomparably stunning view from the 110th floor observation deck of the World Trade Center on a visit from Pakistan in 1974. And two, her reading in Urdu, the words of welcome inscribed in the lobby of that building in over one hundred languages, to all people of the world. Alas, no one shall ever do either again.

Abbas

On that day, the only thing that I was, was a New Yorker. A New Yorker who loved his wounded city more than ever. And one whose only allegiance was to the sentimental cosmopolitan ideal that this city somehow still manages to embody even today. Probably because many people were still in shock and unable to say anything, this email was forwarded along and eventually ended up being one of those things that went around the internet in ever-wider circles. I received hundreds of appreciative emails in reply and my two little paragraphs were translated into various languages and published in newspapers. They were even read aloud by European political leaders at emergency meetings and hastily assembled conferences. People started asking me my opinion on what had happened, and along with all the other bewildering sentiments, I started feeling inflated.

A little over a week later, I found out that one of my close friends, Ehtesham U. Raja, who had so far been unaccounted for, had actually died in the World Trade Center. He had been attending a business meeting that fateful morning in Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the WTC. Again, while trying to recover from this blow, I received many messages of sympathy. And I liked it. And then I felt disgusted for feeling self-important through my friend’s death. It was at that time, while sitting one afternoon in our living room with my wife Margit, in the midst of this confusing tempest of fast-changing emotions, that I sarcastically spewed out (for catharsis) what could in a very generous mood be considered a prose poem. I readily admit that I am no poet, and perhaps there is a bit of what Vladimir Nabokov once rightly described as (something like) “the passing around of specimens of one’s sputum for inspection” about my making public for the first time now what I had written that day, but in the spirit of telling what this horrific event did to us New Yorkers, I adduce it here. Please be gentle in judging me:

How We Became Important

At first we were thrilled,

the way one is thrilled by thrillers.

It was a real-life action movie, and then it got better.

This was no small entertainment–no Amtrak derailment,

no mere collision of jumbo jets over Tenerife.

It was something bigger,

and it was right on our doorstep, just outside our window.

It was real.

ABC News went off the air and, being engineers,

we realized the thin hypodermic,

a transmitting antenna, was destroyed.

We felt clever, in the know.

We changed channels.

We called family members

in anxious, incredulous excitement,

but we couldn’t get through.

Well, yes. That made sense.

This was big.

And then we saw thousands perish in an instant.

In a brown cloud.

Live on television.

And we wept. (Later we would brag about this weeping.)

We inventoried important landmarks nearby,

wondering if we would be next,

but we knew it was fantasy,

a wish for the adrenaline rush of fire and heat,

a wish to be closer, still closer.

Of course, no one thought us important enough to kill,

but it was thrilling to make believe.

We climbed to the roof and watched the rolls of smoke and dust.

We identified F-14s by their double vertical rudders,

the overall silhouette of the Tomcat.

We spoke like admirals about carrier battle groups.

We ate lunch, marveling at the unfolding of History.

We lowered the pitch of our voices, became grave,

newly aware of our central role.

We made pronouncements about death and infamy.

We were lucky enough to be Muslims

(and from Pakistan, too),

and while others worried for our safety,

we knew that no harm would come to us.

All the same, we had become victims–

that most desirable status, that gift of our time.

Now we had sympathy, the ear of the world

for whatever we might like to spew:

hymns and elegies

professing love of this land;

our shock and sorrow, and our attempts to transcend them;

pious lectures about people and nations

outside America’s soft, imaginary borders.

We defended Muslims to Christians and America to Muslims.

We were virtuous, pleading restraint but never peace,

and we became terribly sophisticated in our politics.

We ate well and slept badly.

We dreamed of burning airplanes.

Soon enough our attentions turned to Eros.

Women liked our newfound moist-eyed sensitivity.

You see, we didn’t know if there would be a tomorrow,

and in any case we were too important now

to read fiction or write philosophy.

There was no time for the old things.

This was big.

And then, with our egos already swollen,

we discovered that a close friend had died with all the others.

A man eating a breakfast with a view.

A close friend, gone.

We couldn’t believe our good luck!

Not everyone could claim such moment.

Not everyone would receive messages of condolence.

We had only lived on the periphery of meaning before,

but now, when the landlady called to collect back-rent,

we would ask if everyone she knew was OK,

and hope, hope that she would return the favor.

Rent.

How trivial compared to the loss of our friend.

Yes, there was grief.

But how quickly our losses were recompensed

by feelings of centrality, consequence.

Overnight, we became astute and worldly thinkers,

with courageous and steadfast hearts.

We were potent lovers and sensitive friends.

We were sages and saints,

and wise.

We really thought we had become important.

New York, uniquely, inspires proprietary feelings in people who don’t even live here.  All over the world, I’ve noticed, people like to think of their cities in relation to New York.  Bostonians speak of the Boston-New York axis, Washingtonians of the Washington-New York corridor.  Los Angelenos and Chicagoans too.  The English consume a diet of newspaper stories claiming that “Swinging” London in “Cool” Britannia has finally surpassed New York in any of a number of areas: art, music, architecture.  (There’s no corresponding competitive discourse in New York media – I guess we don’t suffer from comparative anxieties.)  Even in my hometown of Buffalo, where New York City is often regarded as the great sinkhole of state monies, we took a secret pride in being co-members of the Empire State with N.Y.C.  These perceived affiliations and competitions are a way for other cities to append themselves to New York, to partake of its cultural gravitational field.  Paris is French, Tokyo is Japanese, but New York, to many, is a heterotopia floating off the coast of the United States. 

Manhattan’s grid, and New York’s prolific displays of maps of itself and its subways, streets, and configurations, make it an easy city in which to feel at home.  People produce cognitive maps here very quickly, feel comfortable navigating its terrain almost immediately.  This quality of ease, which is so different, for instance, to the impenetrable ball of yarn that is the map of London, is perhaps the origin of the pervasive sense of belonging experienced by New York visitors and residents alike.  No labyrinthine local knowledges prevent the first-timer from getting from Fifty-Third and Sixth to Twenty-Sixth and Tenth.  Perhaps that famous expression of fealty, “we are all New Yorkers now” should have been, “we are all New Yorkers already.”

I may belong to a minority in remembering the World Trade Center as a poetic structure, but the reasons I do have much to do with how it expressed these signature qualities of New York City.   Visually, the buildings gave the sense of a vertical grid, elongated just as Manhattan is elongated, with an avenue of sky running in between.  Unexpected views of them would often crop up, maybe when turning south from Houston Street onto Sullivan, or standing on the corner of Lafayette and Spring, or while driving north on the New Jersey Turnpike.  Emerging from the Brat Pack-era hangout The Odeon, way downtown, their almost ominous presence suddenly loomed over you.  A perfect visual metaphor, they towered over neighboring skyscrapers the way New York towers over its neighboring cities.  Dark masses illuminated by a bright grid, they signified New York.

I often think about how important it was that there were two of them.  One skyscraper, like the Empire State Building or the Woolworth, somehow remains a building, its mass of steel and concrete impossible to forget.  The twoness of the Twin Towers brought into being relations with the air, dramatized space.  The few places where one tower completely occluded the other (such as the pier leading to the Holland tunnel exhaust, off Spring and West Streets) were uncanny viewing points.  The one visible tower despotically oppressed, rather than symbolized, the city.  One tower was a fascist; two towers invoked psychology, doubleness, complexity.  And because the footprints of the buildings occupied two diagonally opposed squares, they almost always presented themselves to the eye as perspectival, one slightly higher than the other.  The aura of their unevenness brilliantly leavened their austere shapes.  They hovered.

As you approached the plaza, you always noted with pleasure the little arches near the bottoms of the aluminum facade.  These merest bends subtly recalled and paid homage to the Deco architectural landmarks of the city.  They conjured the relation of the Chrysler and the Empire State to the grid itself, represented as the endless lines that clad the trade center’s sides.  The optical illusions those shimmering lines made were almost arrogant: excessive on a building that already inspired vertigo.  For a time, the cavernous lobbies contained a satellite airline terminal.  The sight of those ticket counters was oddly right in buildings that, like airports, constituted entire worlds unto themselves, with the frisson of rocket ships or space stations.  The towers’ otherworldliness made them the unlikely site of a Wednesday evening club night at Windows on the World, frequented by Kate Moss and the rest of the New York glitter circuit of the mid-Nineties.  You’d wander around with a drink and then suddenly come to the windows, through which the shockingly faraway streets below gave a pleasing shock. 

For me, the World Trade Center was part of the given world.  It was finished the year before I was born.  I could never quite comprehend accounts of the debates about Yamasaki’s design choices, about the wisdom of his aluminum minimalism.  To me, they were already there.  They were a late articulation of modernism, in a romantic and slightly whimsical version.  And modernism was a credo whose modernity seemed unquestionable, if you take my meaning.  The good things about New York City for me were (and are) related to its embrace of what it means to be modern, to be in the present tense.  From my family’s decision to immigrate to the United States to my mother’s Audrey Hepburn haircut, my life has been dominated by instantiations of modernism, by dynamic faith in making things new. 

From the time of my first visit to New York, when we visited the WTC and I finally tasted my first long dreamed-of escargot, it never crossed my mind that the towers, along with plenty of other institutions of the postwar period, would prove impermanent.  How could what represented the present become past?  But like other seemingly permanent features of life, One World Trade Center and Two World Trade Center now appear as stupendous legends that lasted for a short twenty-five years.  The gashes that appeared in the buildings, as I stared at them from Chambers and Church Streets, never looked anything other than fixable – it never occurred to me not to assume the towers were invulnerable until they fell.  Even the great, floating sheets of metal tearing away and drifting down from above, or the people I saw leap to their deaths, didn’t convince me that the buildings themselves might not make it.  Surely the emergent chaos those gashes represented could never defeat the entire order.  But it did.

On September 14th, 2001, I flew back to Buffalo on one of the first planes to take off from JFK.  The night before, Abbas, Margit and I had spontaneously sung “New York, New York” at the top of our lungs with a bar full of strangers.  There were about six people on board the Airbus, and I was seated in the first row.  I was heading to a high-school friend’s wedding.  I broke into tears at the sight of the smoldering wreck of downtown, where I still needed to pass a military checkpoint to return to my apartment.  I remember clenching my fists and somberly determining that no passenger would cross the threshold separating me from the captain, on pain of death.  As the flight progressed, it occurred to me that everyone else on the plane was extremely afraid of me. 

It is the world as it existed when I happened upon it that turns out to be the fleeting one.  I’ll be simply part of a shrinking group of people who remember New York with the World Trade Center. 

My other Dispatches.

Justin E. H. Smith

What could be more self-indulgent than to recount where one was on September 11? As if other people were not somewhere. As if being anywhere at all on the planet automatically made one a survivor. I survived September 11, as it happens, in an internet café in Berlin packed with smirking German hipsters, who could not wait to go find more hipsters, at a rave or at a squat, with whom to wax ironical about the day’s events and to recount with a smirk where they were when it happened, a whole six hours later. My grandmother survived Auschwitz: disguised since birth as a Swedish Protestant, she rode it out teaching elementary school in Minnesota. But she had the decency to stay pursed-lipped after the war. We on the other hand must carry on about where we were, what we felt and thought, as though that mattered. I am no exception.

The first thought I had when asked to write something for the fifth anniversary of September 11 was: Jesus. I must be really old. I was old then, and it’s been five years. I should probably start wrapping things up right about now. I don’t even have a will, let alone a legacy. I can’t seem to bring myself to think about such things. I just love life too much. I do not want to die.

I knew of course that what I was expected to produce was hard-nosed political analysis –I’ve managed to do it for Counterpunch— and here I was carrying on as though it was all about me. I would like to be a sharp political analyst, I truly would: on the one hand, the chickens of American imperialism came home to roost, but on the other hand taking innocent lives is never acceptable, etc.

Some topics just stifle all that analytical acumen and cause me to regress into infantile self-absorption, unable to write about anything other than myself. My hope is that I will get away with this by lacquering it up with essayistic style, and claiming membership in a venerable tradition. Montaigne got away with it, some will respond, only because in the 16th century the self was a new and exciting discovery. Today it is old news. And yet, today, I carry on.

A long time ago, in that phase of life when infantile self-absorption was not only tolerated but celebrated by fawning adults, I lived in a white-trash exurb of a mediocre Western city. There were cars on jacks and mean-ass dogs on chains in front yards, people hung sheets in their windows instead of curtains, and there were no structures over two stories high. I imagined that cities consisted in rows of buildings as high as the World Trade Center, stretching out beyond the horizon in all directions, with tubular, glass bridges connecting them all at their very tops, for those who preferred not to use jet-packs.

But then I was taken on family vacations to the supposedly shining cities of the American West, and I saw empty lots between buildings, with broken glass glistening amongst the weeds, and plastic six-pack holders, and weeds pushing up even between the cracks in the sidewalks. No, Sacramento would not cut it, not even Los Angeles, and not even that supposedly exceptional Western city, San Francisco. I resolved by the age of eight or so to move to New York, where I would spend the rest of my life 110 floors above the earth, never again to descend to that terrestrial sphere where the dirt and the plants and animals, and the feral human rejects drifting across the great wide West, were condemned to live out their days.

On the day we moved out of my childhood home in the white-trash exurb, into a condo in a lower-middle-class suburb, I scrawled the lyrics to Einstürzende Neubauten’s “Halber Mensch” on the inside of a bedroom closet, with a magic marker, and added a hammer-and-sickle and an anarchist ‘A’ for good measure. It was 1987, and I was 15.

I arrived in New York in 1994 and left, unwillingly, in 2000. I went to the top of the World Trade Center only once, with Klaus, visiting from Berlin. He wanted to see Gary Kasparov playing against Deep Blue. 1997, that must have been. My sole visit to the 110th floor I had once hoped to inhabit was to witness a showdown between man and machine, a popular pastime among the curious ever since the Mechanical Turk made its debut in 1769.

On September 9, 2001, I set out from my miserable little college-town amidst the cornfields of southern Ohio, whither the great Metropolis had cast me once I finished my Ph.D. at Columbia. I drove to Chicago to fly to Berlin, via Paris, for a conference devoted to the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. On the way I passed right under Sears Tower. It looked shabby and old, and I remember thinking: that thing’s going to have to come down sooner or later. Structures like that can’t just go on forever. Is there anyone, I wonder, who will be able to see to its demolition?

I arrived on the tenth and installed myself in Pamela’s Kreuzberg apartment. She introduced me to her new boyfriend, and at every opportunity I suggested to her that she could not be serious. We had a punctilious drink in a nearby bar, the three of us, and she announced that I would have to make my way back and let myself in. The two of them had plans.

The next day I decided to skip most of the afternoon sessions at the conference in order to read the New York Times at an internet café near the Zoogarten Bahnhof. When I arrived, there was a widescreen TV in the café showing scenes of smoke and carnage. My first thought was: nothing to worry about. That must be somewhere really far away and irrelevant. Somewhere really fucked up, where this kind of thing is normal. Then I saw the NYPD vehicles. The hipsters who ran the place were watching and making jokes to one another. In the news report I heard the verb einstürzen. I was more surprised by that word than by the images it accompanied. That was among the first German words I ever learned, having been a card-carrying hipster myself and having throughout the eighties sought out the hardest-core German industrial music available in the California exurbs. It means ‘to collapse’, and is used in connection with buildings and other large structures. Einstürzende Neubauten had presented themselves as anarchists and nihilists, back in the eighties, but certainly not as fascists (and ‘Islamofascists’ were not even on the radar), who would have liked to have seen it all collapse.

I rushed back to the Leibniz crowd at the Technical University a few blocks away. Best of all possible worlds my ass, I thought. I had always found Voltaire an obnoxious wiseacre, all-too easily taking jabs at Leibniz’s Theodicy without having really made any effort to understand it. When Leibniz said this was the best of all possible worlds, he didn’t mean that it was great or anything, he meant that it was the maximal set of compossible individuals, some of which must, being different from one another, by definition also be worse than others. Hence evil. I felt in an instant that I had just had my own Lisbon Earthquake, and could no longer fault Voltaire for his pessimism. But still, the Leibnizians were my people, and I, like everyone else at that moment, needed some company.

On the program for that afternoon was a meeting of all the various national Leibniz societies, of which there are more than you would think: Chinese, Japanese, Israeli, Argentine, Spanish, American (but not, I probably don’t need to mention, Iranian, Afghan, or Libyan). The representative of the Chinese Leibniz Society was up first: he droned on for at least an hour about his group’s growing membership in a monotone ideally suited to some Central Committee report on crop yields in Xinjiang. Then the American representative got up and calmly said that, because our minds were all, no doubt, elsewhere, he would be brief with his news. Next came the Israeli. He wasted no time in telling all of us a thing or two about terrorism. One would not think that a business meeting of national Leibniz societies could turn into an occasion for a fiery political speech, about freedom and its enemies, about the importance of defending civilization against those who would like to see it all collapse, etc. But our Israeli colleague managed to tie it all together. He said that Leibniz would agree with the opinions he expressed, and that it would be a fine gesture to issue a press release to the Berlin media affirming our disapproval, as Leibnizians, of flying planes into buildings. Two days later, in Der Tagesspiegel and the Berliner Morgenpost, there it was: in German, English, and French, a press release denouncing, in the spirit of Leibniz, terrorism. Leibniz, I note in passing, is rightly credited with being an early visionary of a united Europe. He thought the religious wars of the early 17th century could best be avoided if the Catholics and the Protestants were to team up and invade Egypt together.

That night I went out to a bar with Pamela and her new boyfriend. I bought an evening tabloid from a vendor: ‘Zehntausende Tote’ read the headline. There were pictures of bodies falling from the tops of the Towers, pictures we don’t see much anymore. Pamela showed us pictures of her own from a recent birthday party she threw for herself at Windows on the World. I got drunk on whiskey. We talked, naturally, about New York. Her boyfriend had never even been there. He couldn’t relate. I imagined that under the circumstances she might just send him home so that the two of us could give each other a bit of succor.

When I was 13 or so I taught myself to stage bicycle accidents. I would ride to sorority row at the local university and, with great athletic force and balletic precision, would crash my bike on the front lawns of the houses with the Greek letters where the girls were congregated on the front porches. They would rush down to see to my well-being. They didn’t know me, but their collective solicitude had the effect of something like love.

But no, Pamela sent me back to her place, and went back to his with him. No matter. I had the mass media to keep me company: two TV’s, a radio, and the internet. I turned them all on at once. Local German news channels on TV, the BBC on the radio, and the New York Times online. ‘U.S. Attacked,’ read the headline. On the BBC I remember hearing interviews with passengers whose plane en route to the US had been rerouted to Halifax. An elderly British woman said something like: “Well I suppose we’ve got a free visit to Nova Scotia, haven’t we? It’s a lovely city, my niece tells me. I shall have to pay a visit to the aquarium.” Next they asked an American man what he was feeling. “They’re gonna fuckin’ pay,” he replied. “We’ve just gotta go over there and fuckin’ nuke ‘em.” Most of the opinions I’ve heard expressed since then amount to variations on these two themes.

I had to spend a few extra days in Paris waiting for trans-Atlantic flights to resume. There were US embassy officials at Charles de Gaulle, wearing badges around their necks, expressing what passes for official compassion to Americans trying to get home, but calling us “sir” and “ma’am” far too much to seem sincere. On my first day in Paris, after some hours of futile jockeying at the airport, I took the RER into town to find Anna in her attic studio off the Boulevard Hausmann. She was American, and I hoped she’d be good company. As it turns out, she was in New York attempting to get her French work visa renewed, and would later regale me with tales of great inconvenience. So I did not find any company, but I did see the flowers and banners along the length of the Seine, announcing “Nous sommes tous des américains.” I saw these with my own eyes, though I know it’s hard to believe. By the 16th or so, flights had returned to their normal schedule and those of us who had been stranded were being squeezed in for departures. I left Paris on the 17th. There was a false and forced sense of good cheer on the plane. I sat next to a man with a Tunisian passport, and we were exceedingly nice to each other. On descent into Chicago, the pilot pointed out to us that those on the left side of the plane could catch a spectacular glimpse of the Sears Tower.

I am terrified of flying, and have been since long before the events. My terror is existential and not statistical, and no amount of data as to the relative safety of flying will make any difference. It just feels wrong. It is something we should not be doing. Never do I feel more alone in the universe, more abandoned, than when I am in a plane, and it is that much more awful when we hit a little patch of rough air. This of course is the point at which self-absorption begins to border on insult to the memory of the dead. What the passengers felt on September 11, skimming just above the Hudson at 600 miles per hour towards God knows what, could only have been infinitely worse: the ultimate abandonment, the ultimate absence of love.

Which brings us back to Montaigne and the controversial art of carrying on about oneself. Some philosophers say that the self is a relatively recent invention, and that back in the good old authentic days real people had no need for it. I don’t understand this claim. It seems to me any fanatical cave-bear worshipping hunter-gatherer, no matter how un-modern, is still going to be able to think: too bad the mammoths trampled my brother. Then again, at least they didn’t get me.

It seems to me that those who demonstrated five years ago how ready they were to die and to kill would have liked to return to that imagined primordial era when the self did not matter, but only something somehow higher. It seems to me also for that very reason that our massive response in the form of self-absorbed chatter about where we were, and how the events inconvenienced us, might be more profound than it lets on. It is a response to a well-known pronouncement from a cave in Tora Bora. It says: no, I love life more than you love death. Go ahead and hate your life, but I do not want to die. I am a self-absorbed coward, who gets sick with fear in the faintest of turbulence, and I believe in nothing bigger or higher than my own little bubble of a world. I believe that all deaths are meaningless and regrettable, and especially mine. Death leads to nothing on the other end, and the good for each of us consists in avoiding it. The good of the world, in turn, is best seen to by maximizing the number of people who have no hope for reward in the afterlife, and who value bodily and structural integrity, boringly, over the splattering of guts, including their own, in the name of transcendent principles.

Blixa Bargeld, the idea man behind Einstürzende Neubauten, is in his forties now, and has put on quite a bit of weight. Even back in the early nineties, the anarchist feminists I used to know out on Warschauer Strasse, Silke and Heike and Ines, considered Blixa a bloated bourgeois sell-out. They preferred Donna Haraway, and music informed by the ethos of the Cyborg Manifesto. (It’s too bad I had not yet met Haraway back then, and could not tell them that the cyborg professor’s main preoccupations are in fact dogs and baseball.) They imagined themselves ‘posthuman’. One of them, who had been a high-school exchange student in Kansas some years earlier, enjoyed recounting to the delight of all how fat and stupid (how merely human) Kansans are. They squatted unclaimed flats in the former East Berlin, knitted their own socks, and posted a chore board on the fridge so that everyone could sign up to do their part. Daunted by the work expected of me, I stayed for two nights and then checked into a Best Western.

The girls imagined a radically different world, not one where all the Best Westerns would collapse, but at least where the guests would all be non-paying, and would provide their own maid service. They wanted to bring down the system, and then use its buildings. They disdained the boyish need to blow things up. Bargeld, for his part, never blew anything up –the thing about collapsing new buildings was just a symbol, you see– but instead went into theater. He now cites Bertolt Brecht, who hoped to see rivers of blood spilled for the creation of a better world, and who wrote the lyrics for a Kurt Weill song later transformed into a McDonald’s commercial (“It’s Mac Tonight,” sung by a styrofoam crescent moon wearing Ray-Bans and a tux and seated at a grand piano), as his model and inspiration.

**

[Justin E. H. Smith will be going on book leave for the next few months. An extensive archive of his writing can be found at www.jehsmith.com]

Given all the remarkable occurrences of the last five years, it may seem trivial to dwell on the emergence of fiction about September 11. Why not dwell instead on reality, which is so much more outlandish, tragic, and compelling these days, and whose catastrophes seem to have accelerated recently, so that ordinary life has begun to seem like a thing that is lived between bombings, wars, hurricanes, tsunamis, and other disasters? Fiction, admittedly, cannot bask long in politics (it dries out, it withers), and our era is intensely, blindingly, inescapably, and at times all-embracingly political. A novel cannot convey with any resonance the contemporary irony of an open racist like Patrick Buchanan finding a soapbox at antiwar.com, or, conversely, explain how good liberal intellectuals, through opening some sort of Pandora’s Box of nationalistic pseudo-patriotism, came to wring their hands over whether sleep deprivation is torture. Anyone who’s read The Gulag Archipelago or who is familiar with ‘sleep deprivation psychosis’ knows that answer is not complicated or morally ambiguous.

This stuff, you couldn’t make up. And, although the “September 11 truth movement” (which dominates the first page in a “9/11 truth” Google search) is, strictly speaking, a collective work of epic fiction, fiction writers could not have invented it or predicted its strange hypnotic power over people who should be able to recognize when an idea with the intellectual credibility of the Heaven’s Gate cult is presented by charlatans – and on progressive radio stations, no less. A punk band from the eighties called The Dead Milkmen put it best, and their maxim still applies: It’s a fucked up world.

Almost more than September 11 fiction itself, I am fascinated by the hostile reaction it often gets. There is a ritualistic aspect to the trashing of September 11 fiction, as if it were a ceremonial humiliation that our great minds have to be put through for attempting the impossible, a sort of midlife career change or imaginative retooling for writers suddenly made to feel that their worldview is obsolescent. Admittedly, some of the stuff published so far on the subject has not been very good. But there is another dimension to the case, which is that the wry people at cocktail parties tell us that none of it can be any good, which may be a sign that these writers are on to something. (These same wry people tell us that web logs are worthless enterprises.)

Why does a thoughtful critic like James Wood see the text of John Updike’s Terrorist through a blood-red gauze of derision and fury? Is it really the worst thing Updike ever wrote? Why did the New York Press take extraordinary measures to assassinate the character of Jonathan Safran Foer for writing the seemingly heartfelt Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? And what about Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, and Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, probably the most laughed-at novel from a major literary figure published in recent memory? Why is it that the usually melty ambiguous anodyne reviewer, normally prone to disguising his or her actual opinions of books in bland, sales-wrecking polite prose, discovers a voice of Hearstean bombastic rage when September 11th, terrorism, or the current political climate is the subject of a new novel? Is it because these books are unusually bad (some of them are)? Or is something else going on? And why has film – in the form of United 93 and Paradise Now – done better so far?

Part of the problem is the subject matter itself. Despite the recent and intriguing effort of Martin Amis, a stylish and witty writer with formidable intellectual powers, I still do not believe that Muhammad Atta can be rendered into interesting material for fiction. The simple reason is that Atta was not an interesting man; he was a man who once recoiled from the talking animals of the Disney film The Jungle Book with the commentary, “Chaos, chaos.” There is a basic confusion here about the nature of the events of September 11, which in themselves were unspeakably horrific and of monumental historical importance, with no fictionalization needed to make them more unspeakable, horrific, or important.

Those novels that take other current events as their starting point, like the day of global antiwar protests depicted by McEwan, or the hypothetical plot to cashier Bush relished in detail by Baker’s characters, have an even more difficult hill to climb in literary history because their real-life resonances are so time-bound. But this is the risk of all topical fiction – but Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls were once pretty topical, too.

A short note about what I think is the best attempt so far to scale this Everest of grief by an American writer, Deborah Eisenberg’s extraordinary short story collection Twilight of the Superheroes, which came out from FSG earlier this year. The title story is the only piece of fiction I have ever read about September 11 that gives me a sharp shock of recognition in the guts, the heart, and the brain. It is one of those works in which the author has written down what everyone is secretly thinking.

She got certain things that no one had gotten, or got them down, anyway – although her story is marred at points by over-dwelling in vaguely acceptable liberal explanations of the “root causes” of terrorism that, personally, have always struck me as nonsense. She wisely does not set her story inside the Towers, instead taking various tangent lines through time, moving the film quickly backward and forward so that the narrative never dwells for long on the event itself, the singularity, the black hole of meaning in Lower Manhattan. Instead, she depicts a group of listless young people who’ve subletted a luxury apartment overlooking the World Trade Center, and takes you into their lives before, during, and after the attacks. Good fiction shows time passing, human change, in ways that other art cannot.

Consider just one remarkable passage, one of many in the story:

One kept waiting – as if a morning would arrive from before that day to take them all along a different track. One kept waiting for that shattering day to unhappen, so that the real – the intended – future, the one that had been implied by the past, could unfold. Hour after hour, month after month after month, waiting for that day to not have happened. But it had happened. And now it was always going to have happened.

That is the world we inhabit, described with an simple, elegant, fearless, and heartbreaking clarity. Fiction still has new things to tell us, things our Secretary of Defense and national philosopher Donald Rumsfeld would call ‘unknown unknowns’: things we don’t know we don’t know. I would like to imagine that in twenty years Rumsfeld will cut a rather ignominious figure. It is politically although not logically impossible that he could go to jail under U.S. law for grave violations of the Geneva Conventions barring the torture of prisoners; perhaps it is more likely that he will end his days like Kissinger, with foreign travel a sometimes delicate matter. At any rate, I hope he will be a man diminished, and not enlarged, by history. I also hope Deborah Eisenberg will be even better known than she is now, especially to sympathetic readers who want to understand what happened to us along the way from September 11 to whatever future future we haven’t yet figured out how to keep from happening or, ultimately, having happened.

Some of my most significant relationships—to people, places, and projects—are matters of a delicate violence. I’d not venture such a dramatic statement had I not been desperately looking to get out of the heat one afternoon two weeks ago and ducked into a small museum with a rich exhibition of photographs temporarily on view. The air conditioning was just barely strong enough to fight the sweltering heat outside, and the works by Henri Cartier-Bresson on exhibit inside were more than strong enough to fight any fatigue caused by the languid late-summer day. The photographs were on loan from the artist’s eponymous foundation in Paris to the Museum of Rome at Palazzo Braschi, and were divided into two sections—an homage to Rome and portraits. Refreshingly, there were almost no didactic walls or labels filled with irksome curatorial elucidation whatsoever, and most texts were direct quotes of the photographer. Somehow I kept reading what he said not only in light of photography, but also as it applies to life and its related arts.

Entering the show, the viewer—who is naturally set to judge what is about to be seen—is brought into a relationship with the photographer as he speaks of what “our” eye must do, and how it must do it: “Our eye must continually measure and judge. We change the perspective with a slight bend of the knee, and we create coincidences of lines with a simple movement of the head by a fraction of a millimeter, but this can only be done at the speed of a reflex, without trying to make Art.” Is he talking about a photographer’s eye, or that of a draughtsman (he first worked in drawing and painting), surveyor, designer, architect, or stylist? Perhaps he doesn’t intend this on a strictly visual level at all; I succumbed to my usual problem of reading these citations in the most open way possible, where it even seemed he was talking of how readers must measure and judge the words they read, how a turn of the head while crossing the street can create coincidental encounters, and how chance changes in perspective can create new friends of old enemies and vice versa.

The sheer delight he found in his work is palpable in some of the smile-inducing photographs, but also in some of the more serious scenes and portraits—a weighty yet duly appreciative delight. The physical body inevitably factors into the metaphysical outcome: “To photograph is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge to detect a fleeting reality; at this point the captured image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.” What I find curious is that in many of the photographs the subjects also seem to be holding their breath. A girl running across a square is suspended in mid-step, between sunlight and shadow, ground and sky, yet she’s so convincingly caught that one could expect to see her just like that, but perhaps in color, upon exiting the museum. For days after the show I found that the words physical, intellectual, and joy unwittingly worked their way into my usual daily descriptive lists of events, sights, ideas, desires, and other experiences. I hardly ever have occasion to use those words, never mind all in the same context.

The photographs of Rome were primarily taken in the fifties. On one of his visits to the postwar city his guide was none other than Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the vivid impressions he took of the expanding Roman periphery and bizarre encounters between the new suburbia and surrounding empty fields carry reverberations of their collaboration. Oddly, the day I visited I was wearing a blouse with unclassifiable sleeves somewhere between short-sleeved and sleeveless, which had inspired a fashion-conscious friend to suggest I change, saying that such a weak cut had no business dressing anything but weak arms, and I was unprepared to support my choice by citing some current celebrity or trend touting that particular look. Then I saw that in the first room was a photograph of three women grouped in the foreground of an otherwise bleak field on the city outskirts; one was smoking, one was talking and gesticulating, and the third listened attentively, wearing a blouse of the very same cut. This was a complete coincidence that nevertheless made me feel part of a moment captured over fifty years ago, and I wonder if his oft-referenced Artless Art isn’t precisely that—creating relationships and connecting people, stillnesses, silences, and motions across differences in space, time, and character. One of three young schoolboys shown taking shelter from the rain under his books and waiting for a scooter to pass by and clear their path could’ve been a friend of mine who lived in that neighborhood until the surrounding fields were completely swallowed up by construction.

In 1943 Cartier-Bresson portrayed Matisse, Picasso, Braque, and Bonnard. All are included here, along with portraits of Beckett, Barthes, Huppert, Roualt, and others. Many of these images have become the most iconic portrait of their sitter, and the lesser-known ones are full of welcome surprises; Roualt looked remarkably meek, almost cowering under a dark crosslike form, in comparison to his very visceral paintings and prints. A New York Times article published earlier this year talks about some of the portraits as they appeared in a Paris exhibition, and the author chooses to read the photographs for what they might say about the “power relationship” between famous sitter and (sometimes more, sometimes less) famous photographer. The fact that the Parisian show was subtitled with a phrase of Cartier-Bresson’s that speaks of “the inner silence of a consenting victim” certainly supports such a view, and complicates the relationships that third parties—at a safe remove from the scene of the crime—can only speculate about.

What other artist, alive and well at the age of thirty-nine, has had the privilege of working on his own posthumous solo show in a prestigious museum? In 1947, when it was widely thought he’d been killed in the war, he actually worked on a “posthumous” exhibit of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in the same year co-founded Magnum. He came to the United States several times, and created a series he later published under the title L’Amérique furtivement, or America in Passing, though “in passing” somehow fails to render the senses of stealth, thievery, and furtiveness inherent in the original. Often his comments about photography and his own creative process can seem obvious, but they are clearly heeded only by the few, no matter how many fields they really apply to: “In order to give meaning to the world one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry.”

What does any of this have to do with violence or delicacy? My favorite quote from the exhibition covers it all, and at the same time raises more questions: “More than anything else I feel a great joy in realizing the portraits. That is the most difficult thing because it involves a duel without rules, a delicate violence.” This is just too exquisite. In this translation I’ve favored the term realizing, rather than the more American creating, as it also loosely reflects the fact that in taking/making/creating a true portrait one comes to realizations about the subject (and by extension perhaps one’s self) as well. The duel without rules is the relationship between sitter and photographer, passive and active, the one who provides and the one who takes. But this is so dramatic, he must be exaggerating; I wonder if any other relationship/duel has rules any more concrete than the ones he claims don’t exist in the portrait-based duel? Surely any sort of relationship is governed by laws and limits, perhaps only unwritten, but enforced by fights, estrangements, and reconciliations? And what of delicate violence? I read this as the silent but inexorable crawl of suburban sprawl across rapidly shrinking countryside caught in these photographs. It is also evident in the ambiguous glances from faces we think are familiar from screen, canvas, and page but about which we really know nothing. A portraitist necessarily violates the subject’s privacy in stealing that moment, that look, that expression—but can only do so in a delicate fashion, or else risk ruining the fragile relationship. Some of Cartier-Bresson’s subjects were close friends, some were short-term collaborators, and others he never even met, lawlessly snapping their likeness as they ran past. Although his mention of a duel without rules is seductively poetic, and I agree with him about the duel, I must insist that some rule or logic does govern it. Our adherence to it or disregard of it is another matter altogether.

This exhibition is up from May 31 to October 30 at the Museo di Roma/Palazzo Braschi in Rome. All the images here are taken from his book covers; cheap internet substitutions for his photographs just won’t cut it, so you’ll have to go find the real thing.

Previous Lunar Refractions can be found here.

1. Brief Narrative on the Purpose and History of Wisher and Wish

Whether it is possible to isolate one’s essence even from one’s own species will, I suppose, determine the approval of this proposal. More often than I’d like to admit I’ve rested my forehead on a cool spot of my desk, and with the appearance of having nodded off or keeled over, daydreamed at length of being bird or beast, often a tree, sometimes a fish, never a bug.  One reason I’ve deemed this fantasy fantastical, along with some practical concerns, is that I feel my bones, my skin, my very lashes and the bloody hangnail on my thumb and the burp I belched at dinner to have as much to do with who I am as the dream I had last night, or day, and the way I treat my sister.  I love bodies, drown in them, watch them, hear them shriek and scrape.  How could I be a bee, and still be me; they use their legs so differently.  But having just learned of your existence, after having been up until this point highly skeptical of  Genies, I’m inclined to risk rejection upon the slim chance that the premise of my petty desire should ring true.  So here goes: I’d like to have dinner with my cats.

Dinner not as per usual – me with my sad soup bowl balanced on my knees, learning via TLC how to decorate Stacy from Wisconsin’s dorm room, they crouched over sweet pea and venison diet, served up on a paper plate.  No, this is a grand affair, several courses, pre-dinner drinks, dessert and nightcap, excellent music and cloth napkins.  And it’s not just the two cats living in my apartment currently, it’s several I have known and know.  And Genie, this is where you come in – they’re people, not cats, and they’re the cats as they would be as people.

I’m supposed to convey a compelling purpose, an argument as to why you should grant this wish, and I’m positive that requirement exists to deter wishes such as mine.  Why not wish on a grander scale, give peace a chance or the nation health care or even myself a better landlord?  It strikes me though that (and please do take this in the best way possible) a Genie may not always carry the same spirit as the wisher.  I figure that I could probably do more wide scale damage than good even with the greatest intention, so here I’ll stay personal and girly, contained within 6 hours, with only the added stipulation that I be allowed to photograph the event, and the living cats restored to their original form once dinner’s done.

2. Key Players and Their Affiliates

Kitty, for starters, has got to be there, and in fact I’d like her to be hostess.  The dinner’s at her apartment and I’m guessing that’s some floor-through sprawling apartment in San Francisco full of lovely odd junk furniture and beautiful broken appliances that haven’t worked for years.  We call her the Elizabeth Taylor of Cats, she really is beautiful, and has the most shocking little fierce voice which she uses only to swear when in discomfort or dismay.  Her suitors, Copper and Monkeyface, won’t be formal guests but will probably call a few times during dinner to make sure they can’t help with anything.  Copper stares in the windows at Kitty all day long and once broke into the house and shat under the bed and somehow wormed out of his collar and left it there.  Monkeyface just stares with sexy force, nose to the window.  Yes, Kitty should host, she’ll swan around calmly and make one on one chat with each guest tenderly, remembering odd anecdotes, but stay out of the larger conversation.

Andy (“Pope”) and Cougar (“Jim”) are the next guests, no-brainers, they’re the ones in my house right now.  Andy, god, now he’s a conversation piece and will be quite the party guest.  He’s got a remarkably large head and is a bit overweight, coat black all over and a tail with a strangely wide base, so that he looks a bit like an armadillo.  When S. picked him out at the in-store shelter at Petco, he looked me straight in the eye and knocked over his food dish.  Perhaps he’ll spill the wine, and make some excellent jokes unwittingly, and show up with a bad shave and a sloppy kiss for me.  Cougar is lithe and gray, fluid in the shoulders and neck like a dancer.  He’s got a few concerns which I’m eager to hear aired; he stares with such a worried gaze.  We should make sure there’s plenty of cheese on hand because he loves it.

Then Midnight, she’s a wild-card.  I met her and fed her when I was a child; left out bowls of milk in the yard.  No collar on her.  I wanted to keep her bad.

I neglected to mention pertinent recent events in the prior section, thinking you might overlook the omission, but realize now I’ve got to appeal to your sensitive side should I have a chance of gazing into my dear sweet Morris’s eyes again.  He’ll probably show up early to the party, perfectly carve the meat, then disappear until everyone else arrives.  Wildly handsome and also scruffy, dirty teeth and rips in his suit. Fiddle will be happy to see him again; Morris practically raised him.  Fiddle’s clumsy, needy, separated from his mother too soon.  He’ll make a bad pass at Kitty without realizing what he’s done, dance a little too close. 

And finally Snuttie, to even out the men and women.  She’s a little crackers and getting on in age, and as a cat has to have her face pushed down into food to know it’s there and pisses on anything on the ground.  I’ll be glad to see her, no matter the production.

3. Statement reflecting your wish’s greatest weakness or weaknesses, both programmatically and structurally.

Would they know themselves to have been cats?  What would they perceive their relationship to me to be?  Could I ask them questions about their feline experience?  Would they have human histories, families, hopes?  How much do they know about current events and what movies are playing?   Do their human bodies reflect some physical characteristics they also carried as cats? Would you identify the correct cats?  Who will cook dinner and clean up?

But the biggest weakness I stated up top, Genie (points for being forthright?).  Could they translate? 

My contact information is attached and most every weeknight I could attend the dinner (7:30 would be perfect).  Please do let me know the date and time as soon as possible.

Being a fan of Andre Agassi is difficult – there’s too much competition.  He is the most sentimentally revered figure in the history of professional tennis, which can make appreciating him feel like a form of conformity.  For this reason, with the start of the U.S. Open, Agassi’s declared last tournament, many tennis enthusiasts prefer to moan about the press banquet of schmaltz being spread out before us.  But, as with music fans who denounce overly popular musicians to demonstrate their independence, those who allow NBC’s endless ‘inspirational’ montages to dictate their feelings are merely indulging in juvenile contrarianism.  Having trouble admiring what is too popular is a common youthful problem, but not the one I face here.  Quite the opposite: with nostalgic tributes to Agassi thicker on the ground than confetti, many composed by people who have actually met the man, what can I add?

Maybe I can start by critiquing some of the broad brushstrokes used to paint the man’s narrative arc.  Today’s New York Times contains an illustration of Agassi bisected into two halves: on the left, his youthful bleach-blond maned incarnation; on the right, his current “wizened veteran” visage.  As a visual metaphor it sums up the common conception of Agassi’s career: after a wasted youth spent caring too much about image, Agassi dropped to number 141 in the rankings, then was reborn having learned important life lessons and returned to number one.  Simple, but mostly wrong.  In truth, Agassi’s career has been about comebacks from the very beginning.

Agassi was blessed with ball-striking talent so clean and remarkable that at age four he rallied with Jimmy Connors for a crowd at Caesar’s Palace in his hometown of Las Vegas.  Growing up, he was seen in no uncertain terms as a prodigy who would go on to dominate tennis.  And he duly burned up the men’s tour as a teenager, and in 1990 he reached the finals of two Grand Slam tournaments as a heavy favorite.  He lost both (although we later came to realize that losing to a then-unknown Pete Sampras wasn’t as inexplicable as it then seemed), then reached the French Open final in 1991 again as the favorite, and lost again.  What happened? 

Agassi’s early years were marked by a desire and an ability to hit the ball harder off both forehand and backhand sides than was generally considered wise.  He possessed, however, a freakish consistency in his ability to strike the ball early (making ‘hit it on the rise’ into a shibboleth of the era) and accurately.  First chance he got, he simply blasted you off the court.  Agassi was able to maintain the “flow state” — those ineffable, perfect stretches — much more of the time than others, with less practice and less preparation.  He had a sort of genius.

Yet his talent came with a price.  The unconscious ability to unload on the ball was prone, as all such talents are, to disappear during moments of tension.  This happened to him quite often early in his career; when faced with matches he was favored in, and thus pressured by, he often lost them.  It was as if the punishment for how easily the strokes came to him was a lack of strategies to win (you can see this today with Marat Safin).  The midsection of his career then, was marked by fallow periods followed by amazing victories out of nowhere.  He won the 1992 Wimbledon after playing indifferently for months, with little practice, on his worst surface.  Again he disappeared, only to resurface with a poor ranking and become the only player to win the U.S. Open without a seeding in 1994. 

At this stage, Agassi employed the crafty former veteran, Brad Gilbert, whose professional success despite a near vacuum of talent was the precise reversal of Agassi’s underachievement.  Together, Gilbert and Agassi were able to concoct strategies of point construction that could overcome Agassi’s early reliance on irruptions of brilliance.  Specifically, the new plan was to become fitter than any man on tour, and to punish opponents by jerking them from side to side, purposely not making the killing stroke until a plain positional adavantage was achieved.  This plan wore opponents out, induced unforced errors (which are the easiest way to win points), and, most importantly, freed Agassi from reliance on the “flow state.”   He began to dominate, beating Sampras at the Australian Open to begin 1995, and in doing so generated a hybrid offensive-defensive model for success followed to this day.

Agassi went on to dominate 1995 until the U.S. Open final against Pete Sampras, which he entered having won 27 straight matches.  Sampras, however, had never needed to play the defensive tactics Agassi had developed, because Sampras possessed a serve that is probably the single most devastating weapon in tennis history.  (The shorter Agassi, by contrast, has never had the psychological luxury of a great serve.)  In addition, Sampras never showed vulnerability on big stages the way Agassi did.  He mercilessly served Agassi off the court that day, sending him into a tailspin from which Agassi took two years to recover.

Now, the rivalry between Sampras and Agassi was extremely close.  Every time they met in Grand Slams on a slower surface (Roland Garros, Australia), Agassi won.  Of their sixteen tournament finals, Agassi won seven, Pete nine.  Unfortunately, everytime they met in the two faster Slams, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, Sampras won.  These are the most prestigious tournaments in tennis.  After 1995, Agassi was faced with the realization that all his childhood genius combined with all his adulthood grinding was still not good enough to defeat Sampras at the events most important to him.  There was also the nagging sense that he cared too much in the big moments to be a true killer.

Don’t shut down on a player.  Agassi lost some interest, then made the mother of all comebacks, from 141 in 1998 to winning the French Open in 1999.  This gave him the historic full collection of Grand Slams on three surfaces, an achievement Sampras couldn’t match (nor Federer, as yet).  And thus began a run of dominance at an age that defied belief, and a consistency he had never before showed.  Agassi was ranked number one as recently as June 2003, and just last year, of course, played Federer pretty darn tough in the U.S. Open final, at age 35.

I have spent some time recounting the many comebacks of Agassi’s career, to give some of the flavor of his tenure in tennis.  Rather than a dominant number one, he has always seemed to be an ephemeral victor, an paradoxical combination of all-time legend with underdog.  He has revived his passion for the intense physical work of playing professional tennis after disappointments of many kinds.  Uniquely among top players, who rise to the top, are displaced, and then fade away, Agassi was able to scale the heights repeatedly, never becoming fatally disengaged by heartbreaking losses.  This was partly because of his amazing native facility for pugilistic hitting, much more due to his tenacious desire to play.

Like tennis’ Gatsby, Agassi was an extremely sensitive arriviste; of Armenian-Iranian origins, Agassi’s father had boxed for Iran before moving to Las Vegas to pursue Amercian social mobility.  His drilling of Agassi as a toddler may have programmed Agassi’s later perfection in muscle memory.  Agassi’s astonishingly bad, Merry Go Round fashion sense as a youngster was a sign of his contempt for those who would attempt to exclude him because of his lack of gentility.  Likewise his denunciations of Wimbledon’s dress code and anything else that seemed insufficiently egalitarian to the teenage Agassi. 

After such an assault on a perceived establishment, Agassi’s transformation into the offical Elder Statesman of tennis sometimes surprises.  But the intelligence he always showed has remained constant.  He has an uncanny ability to remember crucial details, and he is probably the most accurate tennis analyst alive.  (Here’s Agassi after playing Federer; here after playing Nadal.)  He is compassionate towards others as only a career underdog could be: he is by far the world’s most philanthropic athlete.  His career has demonstrated that redemption does not come from winning, but from working and giving (as New Agey as that, and Agassi, often sounds).  This last, by the way, is what I believe Agassi means when he says he owes a debt to tennis, that tennis has taught him lessons.

Caring more deeply about his sport and its intersection with the actual world than maybe any other player, Agassi showed that sensitivity can be an asset instead of a liability for athletes, who are more commonly compared to warriors and assassins.  This has had far-reaching effects on sport.  No longer do we think that true champions must be repressive drones or angry jerks.  If Federer is Sampras’ technical heir, he is Agassi’s emotional heir: he wins without negativity.  Federer, Andy Roddick, and others have also followed the lead Agassi set by forming their own foundations (Agassi’s runs a public school in a deprived section of Las Vegas).  The more impassive Sampras won more, and the more talented Federer will win more, but Agassi’s care has won him the love of the world.  The most important thing I’ve learned from watching him is how to defeat winning and losing.

The rest of Dispatches.

Maybe it is OK to be a Nazi if you also happened to write at least one really amazing book. Granted, Mister Grass has written a lot of crap in the last few decades. I was recently trying to read My Century when a fit of boredom so immobilized me I had to watch several episodes of The Entourage on a friend’s TiVo just to get back the use of my limbs. But The Tin Drum is a great book of the twentieth century. It is so good that you can’t debate it. It’s just good. It’s great. A person who has written a book like The Tin Drum has provided a service for humanity. They have managed to grasp and convey something deep and profound and important about the real experiences of a generation. A novel that operates on that level is performing at the very highest echelon of what a novel can do and be. The Tin Drum is one of the novels that actually did the work of putting the European mind and soul back together again after its utter collapse in the traumas of the first half of the twentieth century. John Berger put it this way in his impassioned defense of Grass in last week’s Guardian:

… [H]is life as a storyteller was devoted to grasping, narrating and explaining, with extensive fellow-feeling, the contradictions, cruelties, abysmal losses, wisdom, ignorance, cowardice and grace of people (person by person) under extreme historical stress. Very few other writers of our time have such a wide knowledge of articulate and inarticulate experience. Grass never shut his eyes. He became a writer of honour.

The Tin Drum, in that sense, changed the world, at least a little bit (and for the better). The person who wrote The Tin Drum has therefore become a special person to us.

Günter Grass is also a terrible blow hard and sometimes barely tolerable jerk who has shown a calculated and self-serving side in many of his actions, most egregiously in rather conveniently waiting to receive his Nobel Prize before mentioning anything about all that SS stuff. Christopher Hitchens, not one to mince words, has summed up the situation thusly:

Grass’ many defenders have not asked themselves the question that needs to be posed, which is: Has he at last decided to appeal to the new German readership that is, so to say, a bit fed up with hearing about how dreadful the Nazis were? If this admittedly rather cynical suggestion has any merit, then at least his recent boring writings and operatic confessions would, in combination, make perfect sense. But they would also make absolute nonsense of his previous career as a literary policeman and a patroller of the line of taboo. “Let those who want to judge, pass judgment,” Grass said last week in a typically sententious utterance. Very well, then, mein lieber Herr. The first judgment is that you kept quiet about your past until you could win the Nobel Prize for literature. The second judgment is that you are not as important to German or to literary history as you think you are. The third judgment is that you will be remembered neither as a war criminal nor as an anti-Nazi hero, but more as a bit of a bloody fool.

There is no question that Hitchens is essentially correct in this tirade. Grass can and should be condemned for all of it. And here there is something lacking in Berger’s otherwise thoughtful essay. Berger is right that Grass proved himself, in his work, to be a writer of honor. But he’s also proved himself to be a complete ass. It took Hitchens to put his finger on that one messy little detail: Grass is a piece of shit.

But he is also great, overwhelmingly, wonderfully great. That’s how good his book is. And that is the one thing Hitchens is wrong about. Grass’s importance to German literature and, indeed, to world literature can’t be underestimated. That’s what happens when you write a truly great novel. Perhaps it’s not right, but there you have it. There are lots of weasely little worms who served with the SS when they were too young or ignorant to realize what they were doing and they’ll never be forgiven for it. Nor should they be. Let them rot. But they didn’t write any great novels. When you do something great, the rules change. That is the nature of our moral world, the human moral world in which things don’t work out very clean and nice. They get complicated and they do so quickly. Berger gives a nod to that fact in his essay but he makes it too easy on himself and thus too easy on Grass as well. Hitchens is no friend to easiness but he has to fudge the issue as well in order to achieve the finality of his moral judgments. In the end, Hitchens has to belittle Grass’s writing in order to get away cleanly with his judgments. The one time Hitchens mentions The Tin Drum, he does so with a telling reverence that shows how much he is brushing the question of Grass’s achievement under the rug. He writes, “For all this, one was never able to suppress the slight feeling that the author of The Tin Drum was something of a bigmouth and a fraud, and also something of a hypocrite.” Well, fair enough. But that’s the point. He is still the author of The Tin Drum and nothing is going to change that. It has to enter into our thinking about the man and what he is to us, what he means to us.

The brilliant philosopher Bernard Williams once coined the term Moral Luck. With it, he meant to pound a little contingency into the universalist and absolute moral philosophies of the Kantians and Utilitarians. We are not judged, Williams meant to say, in the pure realm of our actions and intentions, but within the decidedly contingent realm of the outcomes of those actions and intentions. What happens matters. The way things turn out, which is effectively impossible to foretell, has a lot to do with how we judge and understand the initial behavior. Williams was famously fond of his Gauguin example. It was, by any standard, a rather reprehensible set of actions that led Gauguin to abandon his wife and child and take off to Tahiti where he could behave scandalously with very young girls. It was a shitty thing to do. But, Gauguin also managed to accomplish something else. He painted brilliant paintings there. He painted paintings that were a revelation, that blew painting open and revealed new worlds of possibility to the art of his time. That is an accomplishment that cannot be ignored in the attempt to take account of Gauguin’s awful behavior to the people who needed him most. We judge Gauguin differently in the light of his accomplishment. That isn’t even to say that we let him off the hook, but that we simply cannot see his actions as unrelated to his accomplishments when those accomplishments are so meaningful to the world we all share.

And that is where Günter Grass currently resides. He’s in Gauguin territory. And any attempt to reduce him either to being a complete fraud on the one hand or a martyr/saint on the other is going to look like bad moral philosophy. Maybe we simply have to say that he’s a piece of shit who got away with it. Worse things happen in the world than that. But I’m glad he wrote The Tin Drum and I have no question that the world in which The Tin Drum was written is better than the world in which it wasn’t.

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.

— Jane Austen, in a letter dated March 13, 1816

There’s been a great deal of heated discussion in the blogosphere this past week about that infamous Forbes column by Michael Noer. You know the one. It’s where he urges his male readers to marry any woman, pretty or ugly, so long as she’s not an example of that unnatural, emasculating, horrific hellbeast — the dreaded Career Woman. Because dude, that is just a recipe for divorce, according to Noer’s generic “social scientists.” Not because the fragile male ego can’t take the competition, but because such marriages run a higher risk of failure due to the woman‘s dissatisfaction with a mate who might not be able to keep pace with her fast-track professional goals and achievements.

It took mere nanoseconds for every feminist blogger (male and female) on the Internet to be up in arms over Noer’s crassly sexist scribblings; even Jack Shafer at Slate felt compelled to weigh in on the issue. Among the many other objections raised, Noer’s definition of a “Career Woman” is not the stereotypical senior partner in a law firm or corporate CEO bringing down six figures (or more), but any female with a college degree who works 35 hours a week and makes more than $30,000 a year. The accompanying readership outcry prompted the Powers That Be at Forbes to post a rebuttal by Elizabeth Corcoran, which now appears side-by-side with Noer’s original screed.

I wonder whether Noer would have considered the English novelist Jane Austen to be one of those unmarriageable “career women” he so clearly despises. She certainly didn’t fit his simplistic strict criteria: she lived quietly, had no formal education, and came from modest means. While technically her “career” was writing, she earned very little from her literary endeavors — rarely more than 100 pounds per year — and spent much of her life dependent on financial assistance from her brothers. Yet in her own quiet way, she was quite the rabble-rousing feminist revolutionary, particularly when it came to her ideological views on matters of marriage.

Jane Austen was born December 16, 1775, in Hampshire, England, the seventh child of eight born to the local rector, George Austen, and his wife. Her father was a gentleman, with a respectable income supplemented by private tutoring, but the costs of maintaining such a large household meant that Jane and her older sister, Cassandra, didn’t have much in the way of dowries. Nor was there much opportunity for formal education, apart from a year-long stint at a nearby boarding school. But she learned to draw and play the pianoforte, and she was an avid reader, with full access to her father’s considerable library. She also loved to write, penning humorous parodies of Shakespeare’s plays and the more fashionable novels of her day for her family’s amusement at the age of 12. By 20 she had turned her attention to writing novels.

It’s quite telling that Austen’s heroines were rarely girly-girls, by Regency standards, where the only socially acceptable status for women was marriage — otherwise they were “doomed” to be spinster dependents, teachers, governesses, or lowly servants. Catherine in Northanger Abbey prefers cricket and baseball to more feminine forms of play, and loves “rolling down the green slope at the back of the house.” But none of Austen’s protagonists are as modern as Elizabeth Bennett, the spirited heroine of Pride and Prejudice. She is pretty and charming enough to turn heads, but with no dowry, her marital prospects are slim. Nonetheless, she still refuses two proposals of marriage: one from her cousin, Mr. Collins, and one from Mr. Darcy (whom, as we all know, she eventually accepts — but only because she loves him). Either one of them would have been acceptable matches in Regency England — indeed, Darcy was quite the catch — but Elizabeth heeds her father’s warnings not to tie herself to a life partner she can’t love and respect.

That was a downright radical notion in Austen’s day: women simply didn’t have the luxury of marrying for love. Compare Elizabeth’s choices and attitude with that of her far more pragmatic friend, Charlotte Lucas, who marries the odious Mr. Collins simply because she has no better prospects, being both plain and poor — and, at 27, verging on desperation to avoid abject spinsterhood. Charlotte personifies the plight of the low-brow Regency gentlewoman, for whom marriage “was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want.”

As Austen wrote, so she lived. She, too, had limited marital prospects because of her small dowry, despite being described in contemporary accounts as very pretty, lively, witty, even flirtatious — the kind of fun-loving, whip-smart girl-next-door many men would dearly love to meet and marry. Unable, for financial reasons, to marry the young man she truly cared for at age 20, she resisted attempts to set her up with a local reverend in Cambridge the following year. In 1802, then in her late 20s, she briefly succumbed to temptation and accepted a marriage proposal from one Harris Bigg-Wither, a man six years her junior, quite prosperous, but “big and awkward.” She repented the next day and rescinded her acceptance, choosing to live out her life as a spinster rather than marry for anything other than love — even if it meant sacrificing financial stability. In the end, Austen had the courage of her convictions. Noer would have just hated her, I suspect. She, in turn, would have found him quite ridiculous, no doubt making him the target of her razor-sharp wit.

One might be tempted to dismiss this past week’s hullabaloo as the proverbial tempest in a teapot were Noer a lone voice crying in the wilderness. My inner cynic insists that Forbes and Noer were deliberately antagonistic in order to generate just the sort of red-hot free publicity the article has since received. Even if my inner cynic is wrong, who really cares about the opinions of a clearly insecure man who lacks the stones to consider a potential wife his equal? Not me. The whole “Battle of the Sexes” debate seems so, well, 1970s. But there seems to be a disturbing broader trend at play: an abject terror that our society is changing as a result of the progress made over the last 30 years in terms of women’s rights, the roles they play, and the ever-widening array of choices they can make. And we all know how people fear change — even when it’s arguably for the better.

Consider a few examples from The New York Times, which has been running an alarmist series of articles on “the new gender divide.” For instance, on July 9 , Tamar Lewin reported on how women college students were leaving men in the dust, in terms of their commitment to achieving academic success — perhaps because most women don’t (yet) view education as an entitlement, having been denied the privilege for centuries. This should be a positive development, but apparently, it is evidence for a pending “crisis for boys,” despite the fact that, as Lewin writes, “[M]en still dominate the math-science axis, earn more money, and wield more power than women.” One gets the sense that Lewin was reluctant to jump on the “crisis” bandwagon, since she goes on to prominently quote the skeptical education analyst Sara Mead: “The idea that girls could be ahead is so shocking that they think it must be a crisis for boys.”

Further riffing on the “men are victims” motif, the August 6 installment of the Times‘ gender divide series detailed the growing number of men between 40 and 44, with less than four years of college, who are still (gasp!) single, in part because women have become economically independent. Again, this ought to be a positive thing. In fact, it’s a bit difficult to take such concerns seriously. Personally, I’m still waiting for the TIME cover story declaring that men over 40 have a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married; maybe then I’ll start to worry — in between chortles of delight at having the matrimonial tables turned at long last. But part of me bristles at the unspoken implication that the reason such men aren’t married isn’t due to choice, but because all those uppity, status-seeking, money-grubbing, over-educated females think they’re too good for the hard-working regular guy. That’s insulting to both men and women.

Yea verily, I exaggerate for comic effect, but even more unsettling is a nagging sense that there might be a wee bit of truth to that exaggeration. Lewin’s article quotes a young female college student as saying she would be reluctant to marry a man without a college degree: “I want to be able to have that intellectual conversation.” Eventually this young woman will learn that a college degree, even from an Ivy League school, is not necessarily evidence of intelligence — just look at our current president. Ironically, the over-40 single men featured in the August 9 Times article were described as healthy, youthful and happy despite their unmarried state, although they still desired female companionship. It is no longer a “truth universally acknowledged” that a young man of good fortune must, by definition, be in want of a wife. Ditto for young women of good fortune.

And let’s not forget last October’s pathetic “pity me” whine-fest by Times columnist Maureen Dowd, intended to help launch her new book, provocatively titled Are Men Necessary? (Check out Katie Roiphe’s witty, Austen-worthy smack-down of Dowd in Slate entitled, “Is Maureen Dowd Necessary?“) In essence, Dowd complains that men don’t want lively, spirited women who are their intellectual equals because they find them too threatening; instead, they want pliable women in positions of servitude: maids, for instance, or secretaries. At the same time, however, Dowd finds very few men she herself would deem acceptable based on her stringent, “I must marry up” criteria. Can you say “double standard”? Granted, it’s hard to marry “up” when you’re, well, Maureen Dowd. But why does someone as well-placed as Maureen Dowd even need to marry “up”? Why dismiss otherwise handsome, decent men as prospective husbands out of hand just because they’re a little lower on the socio-economic ladder? (What would Mr. Darcy do? Easy — he married Elizabeth anyway, despite her lower socio-economic status, because he loved her and could afford to choose with his heart.)

Jane Austen would never have been so crass. She knew marriage should be first and foremost based on mutual love and respect, and that a union of true equals has nothing to do with their respective socio-economic status. She suffered the loss of her youthful suitor, an Irishman named Thomas Lefroy, because “society” — in the form of their respective families — didn’t deem him economically worthy. (He had the last laugh: he later became chief justice of Ireland, and told his nephew of his “boyish love” for Jane Austen.) Another young man who fell in love with her, and whom she might have loved in return, and married, died tragically before he could propose. (A similar fate befell Austen’s older sister, Cassandra, who was engaged for several years to a young man who died before they could marry.)

Marriage for women is no longer about economic survival, as it was in Austen’s day. Women have never had more freedom of choice, more options for what they want from life. And yet, it seems that the issue of marriage is becoming more about the social pressure to conform to the cultural stereotype than it is about finding the right loving partner. Anyone who doesn’t fit the traditional mold is viewed with extreme suspicion. The message to young women today is clear: Beware, because nobody will want to marry you if you’re too smart, too successful, too selective about your choice of man, because men like Noer can’t handle the competition. And that would be terrible! You’ll be an old maid! With a hundred cats! People will snicker behind your back and secretly pity you!

Thirty years into the women’s movement, and we still labor under the false assumption that marriage is the only acceptable state for a woman — or a man, for that matter.  Even Dowd has fallen into this trap. She’s beautiful, powerful, successful, and attracts equally successful, well-heeled men as paramours, even if she hasn’t married any of them. She clearly has a pretty high opinion of herself. And yet somehow even Dowd has bought into the notion that all her impressive accomplishments are negated by the fact that she’s “still single.”

Compare Dowd’s attitude to that of Austen, who found humor in her “old maid” status at 37, and even relished certain advantages when chaperoning young ladies at dances, “for I am put on the Sofa near the Fire & can drink as much wine as I like.” She indulged in flowers and concert tickets, and delighted in being an aunt to her many nieces and nephews. And while her novels brought her only modest recognition and financial rewards, they did bring great personal satisfaction. When she died — probably of Addison’s disease — at 41, she was buried at Winchester Cathedral. Perhaps the only thing that would have piqued her ire was that her tombstone made no mention of her literary accomplishments, merely alluded to “the extraordinary endowments of her mind.”

Somehow I doubt Dowd’s eventual obituary in the Times will follow its respectful summation of her life’s work with the somber observation, “Alas, she never married.” That’s because we don’t live in Austen’s Victorian England, with its restrictive social mores and limited opportunities for women. There’s still progress to be made on the road to true gender equality, but I believe our society has changed for the better. Women marry not because we need to, but because we choose to do so, and can also choose when to do so. We don’t have to be like Charlotte Lucas and accept the first halfway decent guy (or, in poor Charlotte’s case, the first pompous insufferable jackass) who comes along. We can afford to hold out for the kind of man we can truly love. And in the long run, that can only be a good thing for both genders. Unlike Dowd, I have faith in the male of the species. I suspect most men, given the choice, would opt to marry a woman who truly loved them, rather than one who wed them out of necessity or raw, status-seeking greed. I consider Noer and his ilk to be the aberration, not the norm.

Austen’s Emma is a strong-willed young woman, perhaps just a wee bit spoiled, with enough confidence and economic independence to be able to view marriage as an option, not a necessity. She meets her friend Harriet’s horror at the prospect of being an “old maid” with good-humored disdain: “A single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable.” Indeed, Emma laments, “To be so bent on marriage — to pursue a man merely for the sake of a situation — is a sort of thing that shocks me.” Emma’s sentiments echo those of her postmodern kindred spirit, the feminist blogger Bitch PhD:

“If you define non-career women as all the ‘undereducated’ who work part-time and make less than $30K, it becomes painfully obvious why female careerists are more likely to divorce than non-careerists: They can better afford to get out of an unhappy marriage than their sisters. That may be bad news for all the schmoes getting dumped, but it’s great news for the gals. So, go ahead, young ladies. Get your degree. Even go to grad school. Gun for that corner office if you want to, and get the guy. If you divorce, make sure to stick him with the shared subscription to Forbes.”

[UPDATE:  I take responsibility for an inadvertent mis-attribution: the quote above was written not by BitchPhD, but by Shafer in his Slate article, who in turn linked to her. So Shafer is Emma’s kindred feminist spirit, and Jane’s spirit throws him a genteel high five for his eloquence.]

Somewhere, Jane Austen is demurely pumping her tiny, lace-gloved fist in the air with a big smile on her pixie-ish face, declaring in dulcet well-bred Regency tones, “You go, girls!” My inner hopeless romantic would like to think her lost first love, Tom Lefroy, who everyone said wasn’t good “husband material,” is laughing by her side.

When not taking random walks at 3 Quarks Daily, Jennifer Ouellette muses on science and culture at her own blog, Cocktail Party Physics.