By Linda Stamato
So many have written and captured images and recollections of Sept. 11, 2001, often with soaring eloquence, but Nuala O’Faolain, an Irish writer, a foreign witness in our land, provides what I cherish, in words as simple as they are compelling.
She tells us in Almost There, that the twin towers were “her familiars” when she occupied rooms on the 17th floor of an apartment building in Greenwich Village, on the southwest corner of Washington Square:
“They may have been bland to people who only glanced at them, or peered up at them from below, but I knew them as my neighbors; I knew them adrift with clouds, and I knew them with their city of windows gleaming through evening rain and I knew them dull with cold in their iron weather before snow breaks out.”
And, then, they were no more.
The towers have been supplanted but they have not been replaced. Their absence has led to a greater appreciation of what buildings, like monuments, can come to mean. It’s rare for buildings to capture the spirit and courage of a people but these surely do, now.
The twin towers are brave people fighting to live and others trying, desperately, to save them, some losing their own lives or compromising what time they had left.
The twin towers are the nation’s sadness and rage, to be sure, and they are also a loss of innocence, a new awareness of vulnerability, the shattering of the illusion of superiority, the ebbing of security in the face of danger. But they are so much more.
The towers have become more than the structures that were destroyed. They symbolize an experience so compelling that they impose meaning and order and hope for a nation and its people. They are no longer towers of trade but of courage, resilience, determination and promise.
Linda Stamato lives in Morristown’s Franklin Corners neighborhood, and is a faculty member at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers.
Great point, Francis. We’ve seen Biden out-Trump Trump himself, despite promising that he would unite us in common resolve like September 11 did. He just forgave a half a trillion dollars in student debt, he colluded with social media to silence any dissent on covid, his regulators continue to impose once though unfathomable control on the private economy, and continues to allow unvaccinated migrants to pour over our border, while holding others to a different standard (like preventing Novak Djokovic from competing in the US Open). Dont get me started on Hunter…You think Trump is the issue? He isn’t even on the ballot, but Biden dragged him and his MAGA movement via his speech in Philly earlier this month as the dems know reminding voters of Trump the only chance they have of not being slaughtered in the midterms…look to your presently elected officials for the greatest threat to our republic.
Your eloquent thoughts turn mine toward a sad analogy: our precious democracy, the strength of our nation under threat of destroyers awaiting the signal to attack and reduce it to rubble.
Linda Stamato does it again with eloquence and insight. Beautiful! Thanks, Linda. Dennis Crowley