Ground Zero, September 11, 2001
“All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by….” –Harvey Cox, The Seduction of the Spirit, 1973.
On the eleventh of September, on television, radio, and around campus, people witnessed a sight unimaginable to civilized, sheltered lives, as thousands died in one cataclysmic event. After seeing the footage of the carnage replayed repeatedly, I fled the campus for the comfort of my own home. There, I placed on the stereo my LP of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. It seemed the only appropriate way to mourn the dead in a war not yet declared. I wept as the words of the Missa Pro Defunctis, the Mass for the Dead, overlaid with the anguished, indignant and tenderly elegiac poems of soldier-pacifist Wilfred Owen, surrounded me in that empty living room.
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
to break earth’s sleep at all?