Friday, September 11, 2015

We do well to remember

Obviously I am back to updating this blog as the spirit moves me. Not for the first time, the spirit is moving me on September 11.

Exactly a month ago I happened to be vacationing in central Pennsylvania, and I realized I was in the vicinity of the Flight 93 Memorial. (Thank God for the racks of tourist pamphlets in every hotel and rest stop--they are not, as it turns out, obsolete.)

Flight 93 was the hijacked flight whose passengers realized what was happening, and chose to fight the hijackers. They died, but they stopped the attack before it reached Washington D.C., where it presumably would have crashed into the White House or the Capitol Building. In the year or so after the 9/11 attacks, I found the story of Flight 93 hugely compelling. So, though it wasn't part of the plan (to the extent that we had any at all), I made a point of visiting the memorial. Now I want to talk about it, because I realized a good memorial is worth praising.

I am, above all, glad that the memorial is thoughtful. I remember reading, while we still argued about how to memorialize the 9/11 attacks, about the World War II memorial finished in D.C. in 2004--the sense being that it was too triumphalist, to sterile, and so long overdue as to be perfunctory, drained of meaning. It gave me something to be afraid of in the development of the "Ground Zero" memorial in the footprint of the World Trade Center.

There is an art to memorializing events, which I am beginning to appreciate. The Flight 93 Memorial's design wasn't without pitfalls and controversy, but it came together effectively to, in essence, turn an idea into a place.

It's a big place, too, if you count the whole national park space surrounding the actual built memorial. The effect is that the whole landscape is empty as far as you can see from the memorial itself. It was the wall of names that I actually want to talk about, though.

The names of passengers and crew are carved in a marble wall, but there is a second, shorter wall parallel to it, that turns the memorial into a corridor, like the interior of an airplane, oriented toward the crash site. It ends like this:
A wooden gate (solid but conspicuously impermanent, breakable) separating the corridor from the stone marking the crash site. One remembers that the passengers of the plane used a drink cart as a ram to break down the door to the cockpit--an act that hastened their deaths by a few minutes but fixed it in this spot, where no one further would be hurt. The whole memorial points this way, and the ghosts almost call you to do as they did.

This is all to say that the memorial succeeded in reminding me of more than the fact that people died here. It mattered how they died, and it still matters.