The End of the World as We Know It

September 11, 2001 is a date that will be secured in our history books as one of the worst moments in our lifetime.  I’ve chosen to write about this poem “Photograph From September 11” for a few reasons, but particularly because this day was the only day in my life that I was ever late for work, and this event will haunt me for the rest of my existence.

I worked in Tower Two of the World Trade Center as a “temp” before going on my annual acting tour.  I was a receptionist for a group of eight in the payroll department for Marsh and McLennan, one of the biggest insurance companies in the world.  Marsh and McLennan held 7 floors in Tower One and 16 in Tower Two.  At the time their headquarters was at 66 6th Avenue in New York City, but there was not enough room to hold everyone so it was pertinent to find some significant space for their employees that were coming in from other cities, other countries, etc., so spaces were taken up through the WTC.

At the time I lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn and my living room window faced downtown Manhattan.  I woke late, but not too late to still be on time.  I would always watch “The Today Show” while getting ready for work and through the television screen I saw a replay of the first plane that hit Tower One (at the time Katie Couric was informing the viewers that it was believed to be a small private plane).  I immediately looked out my window and saw the smoke permeating from the scene.  I was mesmerized, I don’t know why, but kept staring at it.  At the time the crash looked bad from where I was, but not to the severity that would essentially come.

I now had put my make-up mirror to the window so that I could observe the hopeful progress while still getting ready for work, and unfortunately the sensationalism wouldn’t let me take my eyes off that horrendous site.  I heard a noise that sounded like a jet far too close to be in this area, and I witnessed the second plane hit.  My television immediately went to static and I was terribly afraid, in shock, and as all the writers that have tried to capture the words for this day, there were none.

I immediately went to my phone and had no connection.  I spun around in circles, walking from room to room, looking through every window that faced downtown NYC, unknowing, unknowing, unknowing of what to do.  I was crazy.  I had seen this, couldn’t believe this, alone and had no one to express this to, and I was crazy because I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO! And I couldn’t do ANYTHING!  And then on top of everything the first building fell.  As I forced myself to believe I was dreaming the second one wasn’t too far behind.  No phone, no friend, only my cats who were sleeping snuggled against one another.  I wasn’t going to wake them up, but it wasn’t long until they were both aware of this enormous cataclysm, as when the buildings fell, the smoke and the ash I could see were coming directly at us.  It was snowing on September 11, 2001 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and the world was in a state of shock.

That day I lost every one of my friends that I worked with, and I wasn’t there to be with them.  This is the guilt that I will carry with me throughout my lifetime; not a malicious or childish act out of jealousy or insecurity.  And this guilt is involuntary.  No matter what I do, it will be with me forever.

I had no idea when I decided to write on “Photograph From September 11” that all this would have come up so easily.  Perhaps I need to talk about it every so often.  Only my family and closest friends have heard of my experience on that day, and when one of my friends suggested reading “Atonement,” I think he was trying to help me rid myself of this feeling of responsibility for my friends whom I had lost that day.  Perhaps it is a good start, since I’m now sharing the most intimate experience of my life with a group of strangers. 

If any of you read this blog, I thank you for indulging me.  It has been so easy to write it, perhaps purging myself a little…and Wislawa Szymborska has helped me too.  I don’t remember when I first read her poem, “Photograph From September 11,”but I remember reading it several years ago, and it immediately gave me a sense of connection to my friends whom I had lost.  I know it wasn’t too long after the Towers fell; I really don’t know when it was that I first read this poem, but before we were assigned this wonderful book of poetry, I had read it before, and I’ll try to do it justice.

In essence, my blog on this poem will be much shorter than my very long prologue to it.  It really is very simple to understand.  Szymborska’s sensitivity to the photograph she is describing is one of horror, emotion, and reality.  However she stays that off by keeping the several personalities who she sees in the photograph with the dignity of accepting what was to be for them, and other than expecting a miracle of being saved, each of these persons (living beings who had families and friends) leapt in a forever positive and a respectful manner, perhaps learning what it’s like to fly for a few seconds, and never having to land.  One of the most modern, touching poems I have ever read.

I have never written a blog post before and am not quite sure where to begin, so please bear with me. We will see where we end up when we get there.

How does one express or understand the enormity of the world? How do we know what the intangible feels like? Or what non-sentient constructions think about life? Or ask whether there is life outside of our planet?

Well Wislawa Szymborska writes about all these unusual subjects In Monologue of a Dog as well as describing war from an aerial view, giving the alphabet its own thoughts, and making statistics interesting.

Szymborska addresses many difficult themes in more manageable terms, like assigning each variable in a quadratic equation the appropriate quantity. She breaks down walls that seem unbreakable. She makes us think in new ways by giving us unique vantage points of scenes that would normally go unnoticed.

By the time I reached the end of her final poem, I found myself having reached a catharsis. One poem in particular resonated with me:

“The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future,

The first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,

I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,

I make something no nonbeing can hold.”

The meaning of the word contradicts the saying of the word itself. Such a simple subject seen from a new perspective must be meant to cause us to ask new questions. What if every time we speak we are contradicting our meaning? What if the very act of naming something negates it?

Szymborska seems to express so much within what is never said, within in the “Zeros”, the silence of the unanswered question. The space left for you to fill in yourself. She gives us just enough to get us thinking, but not enough to simply have the answers.

I believe she writes to inspire thought, and in my case has achieved her goal quite well. So if you have thoughts or ideas as a result reading her poems, then please comment and we can start an interesting discussion.

Guilt is a grave emotion one might endure for the course of an entire lifetime.  Depending on the offense one might commit and the lasting effects that the individual bestows on another (or on them) may or may not determine if forgiveness is ever or even an option.  None of us are without our own faults, and many times through these imperfections we will make mistakes and sometimes the consequences of these gaffes can never be resolved.  Hopefully if the error in our judgment is an unpleasant mishap (without malice), generally we might expect forgiveness; yet if our error is one of premeditation, presuming to injure another being (albeit physically or psychologically), then forgiveness is up to the one whom we have maimed.  More often than not without any professional type of therapy, the guilty party as well as the offended may never quite understand the reasoning of the one who has been slanderous or the depths regarding the succession of what transpired to compel one to execute such a malicious act.  Immaturity is no excuse.  Most of us, if we are brought up in a wholesome family faction, we know right from wrong.  However sometimes if family and the connection to it is so unimportant, and one’s fantasies are one’s realities, then one can (and may often) rely only on one’s own discretion.  And as a child, this can be a recipe for disaster. 

And Briony Tallis is just such a child.  Crushed over a “school-girl crush” which will obviously be unreciprocated, Briony Tallis turns an entire family’s life upside down which will never be attuned again.  Whether or not this is her reasoning for implicating Robbie for the rape of Lola, Briony’s accusation is unmistakably a criminal offense.  True, it is not that the Tallis family is a jubilant family initially, but the Tallis family appears to be a family of accepting “of what is” without questioning.  Briony who lives within her own fantasies carries on as though she is an adult (and although not an adult, but one who needs to be in control, assuming that she is one) takes it upon herself to direct others lives through her own fantasies which is enough for her to create a “real” monstrous life for the ones that she actually cares for.  And honestly, I wonder if she knows what it is to care for anyone.

After a few years of suffering over her excessive fallacy, realizing the damage she has caused, Briony instead of attending Cambridge, decides to enroll in the nursing school her sister Cecilia attended.  She wants to be forgiven; not only by Cecilia and Robbie, but she wants to forgive herself as well.  By scrubbing down floors, washing blankets, making beds, and scrubbing bedpans on a daily basis should surely overthrow this guilt she possesses.  But it doesn’t, and in fact it never will.

Near the end of this novel, Briony decides to rewrite history.  And I was insulted.  I guess it wasn’t really Briony writing this, but  McEwan who decides to have Briony writing this “fantasy” chapter.  After reading about Robbie’s circumstances while at war and who I learned of Robbie’s character to be, I was certain that Robbie Turner was a very conscientious, thoughtful, selfless, and a very good soldier, not to mention a very good man.  In the “fantasy scene,” where Briony, Cecilia and Robbie reconnect after several years, McEwan is now bringing back to the novel the writing from the youthful fantasies of Briony.  An example to contradict the “fantasy scene” would be that from Part II in this novel where Robbie contemplates wishing that he can forgive Briony: “He did not think his resentment of her could ever be erased.  Yes, she was a child at the time, and he did not forgive her.  He would never forgive her.  That was the lasting damage.”  Robbie is struggling with this.  He isn’t dismissing the possibility of forgiving Briony, but he can’t, and it is understandable.  And yet still this is a very kind disposition for one who has had their life stolen away from them.  However in the later chapter, the “fantasy chapter” near the end of the novel when Briony, Cecilia and Robbie are in the small apartment and when Robbie states, “I’m torn between breaking your stupid neck here and taking you outside and throwing you down the stairs”…it just made no sense to me that Robbie would become so erratic.  His thoughts at the end of Part II were one of regret and sadness that he couldn’t forgive, and now he is threatening violent harm?  I didn’t buy it.  And secondly, what made this Part II of this book so tender and loving (my favorite part until the final chapter) was that no matter how desperate Robbie’s circumstances became, he kept remembering Cecilia’s promise that she would wait for him.  And what made this part of the book more intense for me, is that I was certain Robbie knew he was dying, but was fighting with all his might, with all his mind, with all his fevers, with all his delusions from the fevers, that he was going to make it back to Cecilia no matter what he had to face!!!  His determination and his love for her were more than admirable. 

(An insertion – a rewrite 11/16/10)  It appeared today in class that a few of you were aghast with me for saying that I was insulted with the “fantasy chapter,” where Cecilia, Robbie and Briony were trying to connect on how to exonerate Robbie, but it had already occurred to me that Robbie was dead from Part II.  And for me, that is why I loved Part II so much…his desire to return to Cecilia, the horror he had to endure to reach her, and yet that didn’t stop him.  On the second page of Part II (page 180), after seeing the leg in the tree, after vomiting up ahead of the two corporals, “He made use of this moment alone to look at his wound.  It was on his right side, just below his rib cage, about the size of a half crown.  It wasn’t looking so bad after he washed away the dried blood yesterday.  Though the skin around it was red…”  Robbie had an infection, and through Part II of the novel, Robbie had fevers (because of infection), and became delusional at times (because of the fevers and infection), and Robbie was smart…he was planning to be a doctor someday after all.  Surely he knew he was in need of antibiotics.  I believe Robbie and I both knew he was going to die (clarification…I do know this is fiction).  To reiterate…why I got so upset with the fantasy scene.  I felt as though I was being duped.  And I was right.

As much as I disliked Briony after her major faux pas, in the final chapter of this book, I care for her more than probably anyone else does, again as I did in the beginning of this novel.  She is an older lady now, resigning to the fact that there is nothing more she could have done or can do now to put right the past, and must now just have to accept her life as it was, and is at this moment.  There is a tranquil quality in how she now carries herself (perhaps it is her dementia, but I don’t believe that), and there is almost a classy inferiority that she now possesses where I begin to do a little forgiving myself.  And this chapter was the twist for me.

What would Wallace have said about this experience, I wonder.

4-6 Pages.  Due December 2

1. Write a longer review of any of the books from the course, like the one that I posted on the blog.  If you choose to do this assignment, please do not review White Teeth again, and please choose a different work from the one that you wrote about in your first formal paper.

2. One might read David Foster Wallace’s essay, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” as simply a piece about the peculiarities of the cruise ship experience.  But one might also claim that he is trying to describe a larger problem within contemporary American society and using the cruise ship as a metaphor.  What do you think that problem is?  How does Wallace’s comedic style of writing help him to communicate his preoccupations?

3. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth explores two competing impulses, both frequently celebrated within our public discourse: the urge to promote cultural diversity and expose people to a variety of different ethnic traditions and the urge to preserve one’s own inherited culture in the name of authenticity and thus to resist the influence of other traditions.  What does Zadie Smith have to say about these urges?  Does she advocate one or the other?  Does she critique either?  Does her book offer some recipe or model for surviving the challenges of a multicultural world?  If so, what is it?  Or does she avoid taking a strong position, and if so, why does she avoid doing so?

4. In The Gay Science the philosopher Nietzsche remarks:

This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!

Zadie Smith references this notion of “eternal recurrence” multiple times in White Teeth.  Does this strike you as an accurate description of the philosophical position that her novel is seeking to underscore?  Why or why not?

5. A central theme in Ian McEwan’s Atonement is time, and the various ways in which we experience it.  Time is one of those phenomena that is so constantly present to our minds, that we think we can grasp it rather easily.  But can we?  What new ways of understanding the passage of time does Atonement offer us?

6. As Robbie Turner is retreating to Dunkirk, he recalls the world before the war: “A dead civilization.  First his own life ruined, then everyone else’s” (204).  Is Atonement about the death of a civilization?  How so?  What exactly has been lost?  And how does Ian McEwan attempt to capture that loss?

7. In his poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” W.H. Auden famously proclaimed: “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper.”  If poetry makes nothing happen, then what can it do?  What does the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska do?  Is Auden’s statement applicable to her work?  How so?

8.  Mohsin Hamid asks us to imagine that the text of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a monologue delivered by a Pakistani to an American in a café in Lahore.  What kind of relationship does the novel construct between the speaker and listener?  What sort of reaction is the narrator seeking to elicit, and how do his modes of address elicit this reaction?  How does this narrative framing device influence our responses to the text, as readers?  And what is the relationship between this device and the larger themes that Hamid is exploring?

9.  In an interview printed at the end of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsim Hamid remarks, “I feel I have written from a stance that is both critical of and loving toward America.  I hope that readers will feel my affection and see that my intent is not to gloss over the very real pain of September 11 but rather to reconnect parts of my world, and myself, that have grown increasingly divided.”  Is this what the Hamid’s novel accomplishes?  If so, how?  If not, why not?

The style of the book feels very fresh and had a sort of fantastical. As I stated in my presentation the book had a Tolkien feel to it. The way that McEwan describes the events keeps the reader wanting to know the events that are going to happen next.

The environment plays a big role on the characters. Taking note of the location of the house is another big detail. It is a big ugly house literally in the middle of nowhere. This affects a lot of the characters development in the story. Briony for example became an introverted writer keeping to her imagination as much as possible. Being secluded during her summers has limited her social skills and has made her very naïve to the world around her. She is very selfish that wants everything her way and she usually had it until her cousins came and she had to deal with the competition. Or when she sees the incident in between her sister Cecelia and Rob she lets her imagination get the better of her and she makes up the three different point of view from her on imagination instead of actually trying to find out what really happened.

Cecelia on the other hand probably had the same problem as a child. This is shown through her interactions with Robbie. She mentions how she has an awkwardness when ever she speaks with him. Even though she has an awkwardness she also handles him very harshly. I could imagine when she was younger she was also an introvert. She is a bibliophile that probably delved into books as a child and kept to herself. When she left to college she probably relished the freedom and became her own person. She started to smoke, she became messy, and she became probably even more modern because of the freedom and the education.

Briony is a dreamer, always looking for the inspirational story, whether it is in her imagination or inspired by reality. The problem is that she does not always know how to separate the two. As described by Briony’s mother, Emily, Briony is “always off and away in her mind, grappling with some unspoken, self-imposed problem, as though the weary, self-evident world could be reinvented by a child.” And, because Briony is a child, no matter how hard she tries not to be, she cannot be blamed for the misinterpretations that she makes.

After watching Cecilia dive half-naked into a fountain, Briony receives an apology letter from Robbie, which she is meant to deliver to Cecilia. She reads it, and believes that Robbie’s intentions are to attack Cecilia. Her naivety and lack of knowledge and/or experience makes her overreact and change her opinion of Robbie, regardless of how long she has known him. She believes him to be a monster, even though she has no actual proof.

Briony gets her “proof” when she catches Cecilia and Robbie having sex in the library. She describes the incident as an “attack, a hand-to-hand fight. The scene was so entirely a realization of her worst fears that she sensed that her overanxious imagination had projected the figures onto the packed spines of books.” Cecilia and Robbie could not meet Briony’s eyes, which only confirmed her belief in that something horrible happened. She compares Robbie to a hulking mass engulfing Cecilia. Shocked by what she has just witnessed, Briony cannot help but run from the library, even after Cecilia and Robbie have both left.

From the very beginning of his novel Atonement , Ian McEwan paints a vibrant characterization of Briony Tallis. At only eleven, Briony is very mature for her age, having already written and meticulously prepared the performance of her seven-page play “The Trials Of Arabella.” McEwan states that Briony “was one of those children possessed by the desire to have the world just so.” This need for perfection stretches from the tidiness of her room to her love for writing; it is through this hobby that Briony is able to tame an unruly world.

 Briony’s desire for idealism creates a divide between her imagination and reality. Despite knowing about her aunt and uncle’s deteriorating marriage, Briony chooses to give it no thought for not only was divorce an improper subject, but it “offered no opportunities for the author.” This rejection of reality in order to incorporate her own beliefs about how the world should be is a common trend in Briony’s character.

 That being said, it quickly becomes apparent that while Briony’s need for perfection is marked by the innocence of a young girl (it is also important to note that in the movie adaptation of this novel, Briony is seen always wearing white, the color of purity), it can also dramatically affect her perception of reality. For instance, the scene in which she spies on Cecilia and Robbie from a wide-open window (perhaps a very clever metaphor on the famous phrase “Imagination is the window to the world”) Briony attempts to conjure the meaning of the scene. A marriage proposal? Blackmail? Threats? This specific part marks an important part of the plot because it is the point where Briony’s world of perfection slowly begins to fall apart.

 “Now it could no longer be fairy-tale castles and princesses, but the strangeness of the here and now, of what passed between people…and what power one could have over the other, and how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong.”

 Confused by what she sees but does not understand, Briony decides to write this scene from three different points of view, all of which could  possibly be tainted by her biased eye. Hence, “the truth had become a ghostly invention.”

If we don’t ever take the time to be quiet and take in what’s going on around us, we’re bound to miss a lot. In the film “Children of Men” it is often in the quiet moments that the most powerful things are happening.  The suicide kits that were distributed to the people of London, the Quietus kits definitely had a lot of meaning behind the name.  The “quiet-us” kits would be a more appropriate name for them because thats what they did to the people of the society.  When Jasper gives the Quietus to both his wife and his dog and then refuses to give any information to Luke, there is a lot of powerful meaning in that silence.  Another scene that demonstrates this is when the soldiers hear the baby crying for the first time and stop their fighting for Theo and Kee to pass by. This scene is especially powerful because of the sheer amazement in the eyes of the soldiers when they stop their fighting.  They watch quietly as this one beacon of hope passes them by right before their eyes.  There’s really no surprise that many of the powerful moments of this movie happen when there is a quiet moment because there is so much going on and those are the times where you can absorb what you have seen and really take in what’s going on.