The inhabitants of this city have always known that the rest of the country doesn’t like us much, that New York inspires fear, anger, and irritation in middle America. I know. I grew up there. We had our moment in the sun. For a few months, we looked awfully good to other parts of the United States, but not a single person I spoke to in the city thought it would last, and it hasn’t. We’re not all that loved from the outside, so we love ourselves fiercely, and we perpetuate and celebrate our own myths — the poems and books and plays and movies and all those songs about our greatness — and the terrible wound inflicted on this town has only made a good number of us more fervent.
6
Real New York and imaginary New York aren’t easily separated. The stuff of a city isn’t only material; it’s spiritual as well. What is true is that 40 percent of us are now foreign-born. A few years ago, I read in the newspaper that in a single elementary school in Queens, the children spoke sixty-four different languages at home. Riding the subway, I routinely see people reading newspapers in Spanish, Russian, Polish, Chinese, Arabic, and other languages I’m too ignorant to identify. New Yorkers aren’t bound by a common tongue or by similar backgrounds. We’re everybody from everywhere, and most of the time, we tolerate each other pretty well. The people in this city know that in this we are unique. No other place comes close to our diversity. We have our share of ugliness, brutality, and pockets of cruel and stupid racism, but the fact is that if you don’t like the hectic jostling of innumerable cultures and languages and ways of being, you wouldn’t want to live here. The terrorists understood nothing. When they hurt New York, they hurt the whole world.
These days New Yorkers are talking about September 11, 2002, and how we will get through it. It isn’t only that people fear another attack on the city, but that the date itself will force us to relive a trauma, which, despite our efforts to live normally, is still raw and undigested. My sister Asti told me that she dreads the approaching anniversary so intensely that she tries not to think about it. 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 andImpersonal 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 Brown’s stand at Harpers Ferry, the school was more than an experiment in coeducation; it was a locus of feverish ideology. Both Wilkie and Bob left school to fight for the Union cause. Wilkie enlisted at seventeen and not long after joined the first regiment of black troops as adjutant to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. On May 28, 1863, accompanied by rousing fanfare, the 54th marched out of Boston. By the end of July that same year, nearly half its men and most of its officers had been killed during the assault on Fort Wagner in Charleston Bay. Wilkie James was badly injured but survived. After the war, he and Robertson, subsidized by their father, became the owners of a plantation in Florida that employed black laborers. The venture failed, but their effort remains a testament not only to the idealism of the brothers but to the hopes of the world that played a crucial role in shaping them — zealous, high-minded New England.