A Plea for Eros

A journalist friend of mine, who’s traveled the world reporting from some of the most dangerous war zones for National Public Radio, is hosting a program on that day. She said that for the first time she’s worried about breaking down and crying on the air. What the Memorial should look like and what should be built downtown have become hotly contested issues. More and more people are saying that they want the towers back. I understand how they feel. For a year now, looking at the skyline has hurt me. We all got used to those two enormous and, frankly, rather ugly pillars that loomed above us. But the dead can’t be brought back to life, and even if the city were to rebuild exact replicas of the fallen structures, they could never be more than twin ghosts of a city we can never reclaim. It is better to face their absence as our painful collective scar and to celebrate and protect what has not changed about New York—the city of immigrants, of pluralism, and of tolerance.
    Nobody who was here in the city will forget that day of mass murder, and as the first anniversary comes nearer, I recognize that for most of us the ugly memory surges back at the slightest prompting, and for each one of us, the memory is different. Some saw arms and legs falling from the sky. Some waited for a phone call that never came. Some ran for their lives. Some stood frozen on the street in disbelief. Some wandered in Brooklyn with face masks as the debris blew across the borough. Some in the Bronx and Queens saw only the blue sky turn black with smoke.
    Both in the United States and around the world,
9/11
has become a media euphemism batted around in political debates from both the right and the left with a glibness and ease that’s rather frightening. But it seems to me that like other crimes committed against human beings around the world in the name of varying ideologies and religions, the attacks on the World Trade Center can only be understood through individual people, because if we lose sight of the particular—of one man’s or one woman’s or one child’s suffering and loss— we risk losing sight of our common humanity, and that is a form of blindness, not only to others but to ourselves.
    2002

The Bostonians:
Personal and
Impersonal Words

    “IT IS NOT THAT I HAVE ANYTHING STRANGE OR NEW TO RE- late,” the twenty-eight-year-old Henry James wrote to Charles Eliot Norton in 1872. “In fact when one sits down to sum up Cambridge life
plume en main,
the strange thing seems its aridity.” In 1913, two weeks before his seventieth birthday, James would use the same word, this time as an adjective, to describe the city in which his family had settled in Massachusetts. By then he had been living in England for many years, and in a letter to his sister-in-law, Alice, he declared a visit to America impossible. He could not, he explained, spend the summer in “utterly arid and vacuous Cambridge.” I am interested in this repetition because, despite the image of desiccation, twelve years after the first letter and twenty-nine years before the second, Henry James devoted an entire novel to that
arid
part of the world and called it
The Bostonians.
    Although Henry James, Jr., was born in New York City and spent a good part of his childhood en route from one European city to another, as he, his siblings, and their mother followed the restless Continental wanderings of Henry James, Sr., Boston and Cambridge would become deeply familiar places for the novelist. During the academic year 1862-63, he studied law at Harvard before giving it up for a life of writing. His family moved to Boston in 1864 and shortly thereafter settled permanently in Cambridge at 20 Quincy Street. But long before the family’s relocation, the ideas of New England had been running in Henry Senior’s blood. The James children grew up in an atmosphere of idealism, reform, and new thought. Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other Transcendentalists, including Margaret Fuller, William Ellery Channing, and Bronson Alcott, were all friends of the family. Henry Senior was also an ardent advocate of immediate emancipation for the slaves, and he sent his two younger sons, Garth Wilkinson and Robertson, to the Concord Academy, where Thoreau had taught and where three of Emerson’s children were enrolled, as was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian. Under the direction of the abolitionist Franklin Sanborn, a fund-raiser and active conspirator in John