Observations-September 11, 2020

September 11 is a date that is seared in the minds of most of us living in the United States. It is difficult to comprehend that 19 years have elapsed since that fateful day. As we see the memorials crop up on social media on this date; the sights, the eeriness of the day and the many days that followed flood our memories and  overwhelms our senses. Many of us will forever remember where we were when we first heard the news.

Unfortunately, it has been 19 years, this means that today’s teenagers cannot recall the events of that day; even those who were born before that day might not remember events clearly.  The commemorations and memorials will mostly elicit reactions from those who had lived through the day and its aftermath.

I still remember in devastating detail the events that I saw on this day 19 years ago, as I sat with my colleagues in the cafeteria of the company I worked for. I recall the image of the second tower blowing up, I recall the shock that resonated with us, that this could not be happening, and yet our doubts were dispelled immediately and emotionlessly as we saw live footages, both on traditional and social media repeat, time and time again, the horrors of people jumping off of the World Trade Center and their bodies tumbling helplessly into the pavement. I recall the ash and smoke-filled skies in Manhattan, as well as the helpless faces of those on the ground.  

For most of us who were not directly affected, the memories have inevitably become a little fuzzier with each passing year. If you are not part the select group: people who had family members or friends who had perished; or those who were first responders and their families, who paid with the health and lives for their immediate fealty to their duty, the pain and horror still remains, but for the rest of us, our recall of that day has lost much of the clarity and sharpness. The difference between then and now is that what was once vivid mental pictures have now become memories compressed into my mind along with so many other memories, my recall of the events had lost the immediacy of the moment. The shock that comes with witnessing the moment in real time had also faded.

This is not to say that the day’s events have less meaning to us, it is just what happens with human memory.

The memorials that we have dedicated year by year in total earnestness are pictures and monuments that we have seen before, and are static, earnestly paying tribute to those who had passed. We use photos of the dead to remind us of who they were, our visions of them is forever etched at that moment in time for static eternity, the static imagery does not actively remind us of them as they are, we have forever lost the chance to them as their active and dynamic selves.

We seek to celebrate and honor the heroic, but heroes are humans, not caricatures of who we think they should be, frozen in time. Heroes are not two dimensional and monochromatic, they are three dimensional and vibrant.  By emphasizing the heroic, we are neglecting the heroes.

We are performing these rituals of remembrance to assuage our own guilt and sadness. It is our mourning of the dead, which in a psychic sense is necessary, for us, but how does it serve the memory of the day?

I truly have no problems with the tributes as they are now, but deep in my mind, I keep thinking that we need to do more to make the memories and the memorials more sustainable, more active,  and we need to make the memorial more salient and proactive.

19 years is a short time in the arc of human existence. It would be imprudent to draw conclusions and make judgments on the meaning of our fading memories regarding 9/11. What we can do is to say that we should not let this memory go by ritualistically as if it was just another obligation we needed to satisfy.  

Why am I writing this right now, it is because I wondered what we will be thinking about when we think about 9/11 20 years from now or 40 years from now? How can we actively preserve both the horrors and inspirations of that day, that week, that month in perpetuity, as we had reflectively avowed? How can we turn the ritualistic rut of remembrance that we comfortably perform almost automatically into something more meaningful, more purposeful, and more thoughtful? How can we make our observance of the anniversary less automatic, less symbolic, less practiced, and less comfortably familiar?

The answer lies in what we have done as a collective, as a nation, and as a society.  Why does it take a celebrity like Jon Stewart to beg congress to make the first responder compensation fund permanent? If we are indeed grateful for their sacrifice, this should be a no-brainer. This is but one example where the politicians sought to politicize a monumental scar upon our collective psyche. Thankfully, Jon Stewart called their bluff and held their feet to the fire. It took all the potential bad publicity and potential bipartisan anger to get the present administration to back off. The question is why? Why should it take so much effort?

Part of the answer lies in what I had mentioned before, tragedies and deaths mean passive memorialization to us. It needs to mean active participation in the democracy, it needs to mean active reconstruction of our democracy as it should be practiced and executed, it needs to mean that active civic actions are organized to pay honor to those who had perished every September 11^th in addition to the traditional memorials. It needs to mean that we are continually bettering our society to make it worthy of their sacrifice.

On Books-Why Did I Stop Reading This Book?

The beauty of having an antilibrary, is that you will always have the books that you have stopped reading available to you to reconsider your decision. The concept of the antilibrary came from Umberto Eco the symbiotics scholar, as well as the author of the Name of the Rose and various other novels. He is well known for having a library of over 30,000 volumes.

Walk through Umberto Eco's Library

The antilibrary is a personal library consisting of far more books that has not been read than books that has been read. It is a point of pride and it is also a point of pragmatism.  The point of pride comes from the owner’s ability to distinguish between the reality that there is more knowledge that the owner does NOT know, because there are books that they have not read, than there are knowledge that owner does know. The point of pragmatism comes from the knowledge that the reader has an abundance of references available at their disposal to indulge their curiosity whenever they wish, even when they are not on the world wide web. Most people do not have antilibraries of course, because the habit can be expensive, the books take up a lot of space, and partly because many people are under the delusion that showing the extent of their knowledge is more important and impressive than showing the extent of their ignorance.

I am proud that I have an antilibrary, not to the extent of Eco, but I do have a collection of books that I am proud of; the majority of the books I own I have not finished reading, although I have started reading them at least once. There was a time that I felt guilty about the untapped investments in paper, but I stopped feeling guilty when I realized that I would one day go back to read the books. Ideally, I thought that I should read every new book that I bought; the reality, of course, is that I buy more books than I can read at one time, and I never not buy books because I have unread books on my shelves;  those books that I have not read accumulates exponentially with each visit to the bookstore or, with each visit to a bookstore website.

This essay is about those books that I have left behind but have returned to after a hiatus to finish and the reason for these respites from those books.

I usually give up on a book because it  just did not hold my interest, I found the slog of reading discouraging, I became easily distracted as I am reading, I disliked the writing, or I found the subject matter not as engrossing as I had imagined. There are many books that I had given up reading, as my basement full of books will attest. There are times, quite often actually, that I will find a treasure trove of unread books as I am rummaging through my basement. I will pause in my search for whatever it was that I was searching and think: “I forgot I had that”, or “that sounds interesting”.  It is like opening presents on Christmas morning, there are as many presents as there are forgotten books.

After the initial delight of discovery, I would inevitably ponder the reasons for abandoning a book. I would search my memory for the reason: was it the writing? Was it the subject? Was it the organization? What was the reason for my abandoning a book that had once held my interest long enough to pay for it, invest time and energy in initially devouring it?

One book that I can recall which followed that fate is a book that had become one of my favorites. The  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, a title that was thrown around in late night college dorm room bull sessions for many decades. I have started that book numerous times and never got traction with the story. The beginning was rather slow, and the narrative really did not gain momentum for many pages. The characters were not interesting, and the pace of the initial pages were hardly engrossing. I had heard once that one needs to give a book 50 to 100 pages, if one still cannot get any traction then it is time to stop reading. I am not sure I agree with that assessment, but I soldiered through the beginning a few times and left it alone for extended periods of time. The last time I started the book, I felt like I flew through the initial pages, as the words had become familiar since I had read them so many times previously, that momentum carried me to the point where Pirsig introduced Phaedrus, and that was when I got hooked. As it became clear that when Pirsig spoke of Phaedrus, he was speaking of himself, that was when the book opened for me, as the reading experience became an exercise in mind expansion, without the chemical aids.  It is still one of my favorite books.

Another book that is on my pantheon of great books but did not hold my interest in my first few forays into its pages was Magister Ludi by Herman Hesse, it is also known as The Glass Bead Game. This book goes back to my callow youth, Hermann Hesse was the author that adolescent boys read because it was deep and ostentatiously cerebral. We were all trying to out deep each other so Hesse was the means to do it. I had started the Magister Ludi a few times without the story grabbing my attention, the fact that it was in a mythical Germanic setting that did not have any indication of identifiable time frame made  it intriguing but also confusing. I had devoured Siddartha, Narcissus and Goldmund, and Steppenwolf in short order, but that fact  made no difference in my ability to be interested.  I made numerous attempts without any success.  It was not until I left the book alone for a number of years before returning to it that I was able to not only finish the book but be completely absorbed into the cloistered intellectual world of Castalia. I  eventually  reread this book a few times because it made such an impact on me.

So, what was the problem the first few times? Was it the writing? Was it the subject? Was it the organization of the narrative?

It was none of those things.

The truth of the matter is that I was not ready to read those books, my maturity level, my intellectual depth, my ability to decipher, analyze, and integrate all that was presented to my eyes by the author were not developed enough to appreciate the work. It was not that the book was not good enough to appeal to my mind, it was that my mind was not good enough to respond to the appeal. My maturity,  intellectual and emotional maturity, was not ready to understand what the author was trying to tell me.

As we age, we will, I hope, be able to integrate all of our life experiences and knowledge into our continuously evolving intellect; and as our intellect evolve, we should be able to understand ever more complex concepts in addition to be growing emotionally to be more accepting of ideas that were once out of the ordinary, foreign, and perhaps even repulsive to our provincial mindsets. The ability to return to the books that had stopped us in our tracks is certainly a sign that our opinions and intellectual depth are growing and evolving along with our life experiences.

I now look at my cluttered basement with a newfound appreciation. The boxes of unread books become the object of my attention just as the shelves of the finest bookstores without having to leave the house. I have also gained an appreciation for my young and callow self for having the foresight, taste, and judgement to have bought these books in the first place, well before he was able to appreciate the richness of his choices.

This idea is not new, The New York Times Sunday Book Review dedicates a column to authors’ reading habits, the By the Book column. One of the questions is: which book should not be read until after the reader turns 40. It is new to me however, since I had not thought about it until recently.

Unfortunately, not all books fall into this category, I find that my younger choices in books are a mixed bag. I had a tendency to follow the trend and I bought many books that had not withstood the test of time, but that too is a lesson itself.

Ultimately, the understanding that I just was not ready for the book has taken the guilt, impatience, and self-loathing out of my emotional response to seeing all those books in my basement and made me achieve equanimity, at least in that regard.