Video
Twitter
Facebook
RSS Feed
Amazing Glitz
I am sitting in Balthazar, one of New York City's famed cafés, immortalized by the fab four on Sex and the City and purveyor of cappuccinos and Eggs Benedict to the well-heeled fashion gurus of SOHO before they head off for their designer days. It is the Monday following New York City's fall fashion week (which, incidentally, showcases the styles for the coming spring, not fall), and Balthazar is buzzing with chatter, everyone with their copy of WWD (Women's Wear Daily)--except for me, that is. I am listening in as the man next to me speaks on his cell phone in French, then Italian, then in English and watching as women in outfits I only fantasize about wearing sip their coffees and read the paper.
It's also the eve of the sixth anniversary of September 11th. I'm not sure I have much of a message for religious extremists--unless this survivors' reflection (and that is not a typo--I mean that in a collective sense) counts as a sort of pacifist, tangential kind of resistance.
Six years ago when the sky fell, I was in Washington, D.C., snatching a precious few frantic phone conversations with my now-husband who watched with his co-workers at Goldman Sachs as a snowfall of paper swirled around the windows of their floor, only to then stare in horror as everything turned to darkness after the first tower crumbled into ash.
Despite my degrees and my faith and many other possible resources at my fingertips, I have no idea any more how to ritualize this day.
On the first anniversary I was working at NYU and living in Union Square, the original dividing line of post-tragedy forbidden territory, what suddenly became the makeshift edge of the New York City universe and the precipice where the city gathered to pray and pray and pray and pray and stand on the verge of this strange abyss that was now downtown. On the first anniversary there was much prayer and much gathering and much memorializing and more ritual--both traditionally religious and eclectically secularly spiritual--than I'd seen outside the walls of a church or a temple in probably my entire lifetime. It was intense and everybody wanted to do something and nobody quite knew how much was enough and so everyone and everybody did everything they could think of. My students and I that first year, we did everything we could think of, too.
Each anniversary since, the extent of our ritualizing wanes and this year, six years later, I am debating on what, if anything, I should do or say when I enter my classroom and sit down with my students to acknowledge that we meet together on yet another September 11th. A moment of silence? A poem? A prayer? Or do we leave memory and the divine and the sacred out of our class that's about those very same things--spiritual memoir--at least in the way that these might reach out to mark this tragic event.
I still have time to decide, of course. But this is what I think about as I sip my coffee alongside my fellow, fashionable New Yorkers at this café-homage to the fantasy that so many Americans hold about this city.
And then, I can't think of a better place to be than here at the moment, the day before this sixth anniversary.
September 11 brought this city of glamor and exuberant productivity and the quintessential power breakfast, lunch, and dinner to its knees. It turned the glitz into soot and knocked the wind out of its iron stomach. For a time, it collapsed all the power in the room into a pile of smoldering rubble. And somehow, at Balthazar of all places, I see the breath of this city's life swirling all around me, so vivid and exuberant and colorfully wildly resilient that somehow these few moments become a memorial to the city I love on its 364 other days of the year, on the brink of that 365th day when all the power that is in this particular room will surely stop at some point to glance downtown, to pause, to be silent, to pray for just a minute and ritualize this anniversary in some small way.
In Eat, Pray, Love--the new favorite spiritual memoir that I am obsessed with--Elizabeth Gilbert describes how, at the beginning of a lecture by Thich Nhat Hanh, the high strung, frenzied New Yorkers in the audience--probably much like the ones buzzing around me right now--"became colonized by his stillness." I can't think of a better way to describe how the anniversary of September 11 works its way into the minds and days of those who live and work in this city. At any given moment we are colonized into stillness at the breadth of this tragedy. And perhaps this year, we will be colonized into stillness, too, at the way that this tragedy, our tragedy, has led this country to avenge itself by spreading tragedy to the Nth power across the globe--unleashing our own brand of extremism I suppose--and wonder, in our silence, what in this world and maybe the next and with all the religious wisdom we could muster, might possibly tame the monster that we first met six years ago.
But for now I remain in awe of the life that is moving on all around me.
By
Donna Freitas
|
September 12, 2007; 4:27 PM ET
Save & Share:
Previous: Extreme in Love, Not Violence |
Next: The Tipping Point to Peace
Posted by: DuckPhup | September 15, 2007 1:45 PM
Report Offensive Comment
What an amazing way to sum up the dedication and sacrifice that so many of our service men and women have made, not to mention their families, in combating militant extremism in various lands. I wonder how the children of Iraq whose school I and fellow service members rebuilt and restocked with school supplies would feel about that. I wonder how my fellow Iraqi service members who I worked with as they stood up their defense forces to defend their new freedoms would feel about that. I am amazed every day at how many so called enlightened and intelligent folks like to condemn an effort
they have not seen, not participated in , and appear to be completely ignorant of. They would rather frame the entire world in the vision of some imagined "way it ought to be" turning their own thinking into one spoke on a cog in a great thinking scheme of poking one's head into the sand and wishing all the bad stuff in the world would just go away. We'll rest assured, we in the military will still be here, on the front line, defending the security of our nation and liberty in a world that needs a lot of help. It is our honor to serve you and others like you so you can have your capuccino and ruminate on how terrible it is that our nation is trying to make a difference.
Posted by: Mike Smith | September 12, 2007 6:28 PM
Report Offensive Comment
Ms Freitas,
This was a perfect piece for this day of mourning and pain. Thank you so much.
Posted by: Janet | September 12, 2007 11:17 AM
Report Offensive Comment
WHAT?
Posted by: Anonymous | September 11, 2007 3:17 PM
Report Offensive Comment
Donna Freitas,
I'm sorry you've moved from enlightened Vermont to semi-enlightened Massachusetts, but glad to see you've landed on your feet.
Today's question is:
"On the anniversary of 9/11, what message would you like to send religious extremists?"
My answer: None, because they won't hear it, and, if they did, they'd be incapable of taking it to heart.
Best wishes to you in your new situation,
Posted by: Norrie Hoyt | September 11, 2007 1:41 PM
Report Offensive Comment
This conundrum CAN be resolved... quickly... easily... economically... once and for all.
My simple solution requres only that for one whole month, every newspaper in the free world devote its front page to cartoons ridiculing Allah (peace on him) and Mohammed (peace on him, too). By the end of that time, all of Islam will have self-destructed in a paroxysm of snits, hissy-fits and terminal apoplexy. WARNING: This will not be pretty... but the world will be a much better place for it.
My only regret in this is that I cannot think of a similarly uncomplicated, cost-effective and efficient stratagem to dismantle Christianity... but, oh well... one thing at a time. One only does what one can.