As the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, I am struck once again by the fact that college freshmen matriculating this fall have no memory of the terrible events. Most were born in 2007 or 2008, in the years when discontent with the Iraq War and doubts about America’s mission in the Middle East were at their highest. The “Never Forget” slogan that was a war-cry for their parents has become little more than an admonition for students to recall what they learned at the end of their high school history classes.
Unlike those younger peers, I am old enough to just barely remember the 9/11 attacks. I can recall not only the sense of fear that gripped the adults in my life, but also their noble defiance. The stories of the heroes of Flight 93 and the first responders deeply shaped how I came to think about American citizenship. What I admired the most, and still do, is those who sought to make both the country better as a place and themselves better as people as a way to memorialize.
LOVE, DEATH, AND SERVICE
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks many turned for solace to a World War II-era poem: W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” Although it written originally to express his horror at Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, it was recontextualized and often read, for example, on National Public Radio or in memorial services, almost as a sort of battle cry of liberalism.
One line especially popular in the early 2000s—“We must love one another or die”—perhaps expresses why the tragedy evoked not only outrage and patriotic fervor, but also a real sense of community. Americans were moved by the horrific images coming out of New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and to their credit they wanted to help one another. And as ordinary Americans committed to a new idealism in their personal lives, our political leaders committed to something similar in foreign policy. Compassion, for good or for ill, motivated Americans to stretch beyond themselves.
That most famous line of “September 1, 1939,” though, eventually came to set Auden’s teeth on edge when he reflected on his work. The Englishman-turned-American deemed it overly saccharine, a weak sensibility unable to sustain the soul in war-time. Auden by no means disavowed love; in some editions of the poem he changed the line to “We must love one another and die.”
He came to understand, though, that strong emotions would fade over time, and that his poem was rather flimsy in the face of the hardest truths. Something like that happened with post-9/11 volunteerism; the record numbers of people who signed up to serve their communities or enlist in the military eventually dropped off. The platitudes of crisis are not enough when the time comes to rebuild. They cannot ward off the inevitability of death.
A POETIC ECHO
To remember the tragedy in recent years, I find myself returning to a newer poem, B.H. Fairchild’s short work “Shakespeare in the Park, 9/11/2011.” Originally written as part of a sequence called “History: Four Poems,” it was later collected in his magnificent book The Blue Buick. It is not a rousing patriotic anthem like Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue,” nor is it like some of the maudlin literature inspired by the event. The poem is a profoundly moving reminder of how to see the permanent things in the midst of tragedy—one needed especially as the distance of time grows.
Fairchild’s poem has none of the sentimentality of Auden’s immature work. It recounts not the horror of the attacks themselves nor the furor after them, but remembrance a decade later. The narrator takes his family to see a production of one of William Shakespeare’s greatest plays on what happens to be the anniversary of the attacks and is struck by just how universal tragedy is. The poem opens:
Tonight beneath a Texas sky Lear wept
and gave his grief to a river in Fort Worth,
and an audience remembering the broken
towers of New York lay down their beers
and leaned into the dark.
The plot of King Lear has no obvious connection to the September 11 attacks. Destruction certainly follows the story of an old monarch’s downfall and betrayal by his daughters, but the scale of the drama is far more private or even intimate than the 2,977 people who died on that fateful day. Nevertheless, the play is concerned above all with the reality of death—a theme the narrator and the audience he describes both immediately connect to the anniversary.
The grief of tragedy is universal because the human condition transcends time and space. Like Auden, Fairchild understands that death stalks every one of us. It is the ever-relevant theme that unites the whole human race. Whether in Gloucester’s castle at the hands of the disloyal or on a day that “dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States,” our lives will all come to an end.
That is precisely what makes these stories about love and loss, both fact and fiction, persistently relevant. The narrator considers the strange setting of the performance, at such a great distance from both the mythic Britain of the play and the suffering in New York City a decade ago:
Shakespeare in a park,
where not so long ago two thousand head
of cattle bound for slaughter grazed, stared
across America’s frontier, and heard
the same cicadas’ cry, its rise and fall.
These thoughts do not exactly comfort our narrator. In fact, the universality of tragedy—the senselessness of violence, the inescapable fact of death—haunts him. “An army of cicadas” keep him awake by singing the same “old mad song” and he declares “I will not sleep tonight.” Instead, he meditates on his family, and the wider world:
My children’s children
breathe uneasily beneath the burden
of a story strange and not quite clear to them.
My wife dreams the passion of Cordelia
And the stupidity of men. Beyond
the lavish lawns and bushes of the higher
suburbs loom nightmares of a phony war.
THE DISCIPLINE OF GRIEF
Witnessing tragedy, in other words, makes human beings restless. The narrator’s grandchildren, especially, do not quite understand King Lear, but something in that opaque and timeless plot moved them. Though they are perhaps too young to fully comprehend the complexities of Elizabethan language or even remember much about the terror attacks that defined the political atmosphere of their childhood, the significance is not altogether lost on them. Likewise, Shakespeare’s tale fires the imagination of the narrator’s wife, bringing forth images of human greatness and folly alike. Tragedy is working in each of their souls, teaching them something.
The narrator is the most unsettled of all. “Light will soon be moving on the plains, / and bare, forked animals will rise,” he concludes. “As long / as the cicadas sing, I will not sleep tonight.” The two tragedies, Lear and 9/11, make him doubt the comfort of his suburban reality. He is isolated in his sleeplessness, caught out in the night. Tragedy is ever-present, always waiting on the edges of reality, buzzing like the insomniac insects until it suddenly intrudes on our lives.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the American people are in a similar state. No terror attack of its scale, thank God, has again occurred on our soil, but the trauma of decades of political division and war has taken its toll. Abetted by the digital revolution, community has only receded and isolation has grown into a loneliness epidemic. It seems as though the crisis never ended, and instead of citizens of a common republic we are atomized individuals struggling to make sense of the tragedy of human life on our own. Perhaps this personal isolation has contributed something to the isolationism that has become all too common on both sides of the aisle, the near-universal refusal for the leaders of political movements to actually take responsibility for America’s place in the world.
And yet, in the final analysis, isolation is not the poem’s last word on the subject of tragedy. Attending Shakespeare in the Park is a civic exercise, something that binds the members of a community around a shared theatrical experience and gives us words to describe our shared human condition. Something similar can be said for events and services marking the dark anniversary of 9/11 this week. Fairchild shows us that audiences remember together—and we, as readers of a poem recounting this experience, receive a share in that memory, too.
