The Power of Restraint
1 Late last year, the first announcements of 20th-anniversary commemorations of the 9/11 attacks started trickling across the Google transom. ABC, the BBC, and HBO announced the production of significant documentaries. The Tunnel to Towers Foundation began planning a “Never Forget” walk, a 5K run, a “Never Forget” concert, and several illuminated tributes. Across the country, in small towns and cities, schools were devising special curricula. The Yankees and the Mets agreed to play an interleague crosstown game on September 11. Commemorative coins were already for sale, and on clothing websites geared toward firefighters, police officers, and the military, entire “9/11 20th Anniversary” collections were available: keychains, pins, badges, hats.
We live in an age saturated with cultural history, in which a deep critique of a totemic holiday like Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July is now part of the holiday ritual itself. What we once took for granted we now unpack. Whether this self-consciousness is liberating or disorienting (or both) is very much up to the beholder. Columbus Day is celebrated and overlooked and rededicated as Indigenous Peoples’ Day all at once: a holiday for a nation heading in different directions. But what about the holiday dawning: What do we “commemorate” when we remember 9/11? What do we remember to “never forget”? Who partakes? And who does not?
Growing up in New Jersey in the 1970s, I saw the World Trade Center towers almost every day—saw them from many angles, inside and out, until they became a kind of compass for me. They were new back then, having been completed only in 1973. From the back porch of our house, we could see the topmost stories of each tower peeking over the line of the Palisades ridge, roughly 20 miles to the south and east: when the sun set on certain clear days, the towers shone for a few minutes just before dusk, changing color to match the setting sun. During those same years, my parents would often take me to their workplaces in Manhattan. This meant joining them on the commuter train to Hoboken, and from there on the PATH train that spit out thousands of rush-hour commuters into the subway station under the World Trade Center. This part of the pilgrimage always terrified and amazed me, all those men and women in their business attire, moving with the synchronicity of a large school of fish, those great towers looming over us all.
After I graduated college, I joined the family business, which for a year and a half placed me on the 22nd or 23rd floor of the South Tower (2 World Trade Center). I barely remember the workplace because the job itself was so anodyne, and because the floor’s design—consisting of a large warren of cubicles—was so uninteresting. The windows along the perimeter were bordered by columns of steel dividing the potentially stunning vistas. You could see the Statue of Liberty, slices of it, anyway, from certain angles, and there was something in that lack of wholeness that seemed to frustrate almost everyone there. It was partly that anodyne job and partly the warren of cubicles that drove me back to school, into a career where I still don’t make as much per day as I did when I was 21.
I lost no one on 9/11. But feeling wells up anyway. Two years ago, I visited the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in Lower Manhattan. While all around the monument, families were cheerfully taking selfies,) still standing but engulfed and surrounded by smoldering wreckage where, back in 1986, I would take a late breakfast or lunch. Shaking again. Disaster porn, I told myself. But I couldn’t stop.
