Particularly for those of who work in education, early September slips slowly into routine. Beyond the return to school, as a person whose job includes bridging the cultural space between the US and Latin America, it means talking about the attacks that happened here and the coup d’etat that happened there. At the same time friends, colleagues, and family share stories about how their banal day became excepcional when they heard the planes had crashed (I was living in northern Spain and watched it live on television). Every year I realize that my newer students were younger when the US was attacked. A few years ago, 2001 became a year they lived, while the attacks were something they were told about. Soon we’ll reach the point when they were not even born.
This comfortable annual repetition has dulled the experience as it slowly transforms from an event in my life to a chapter in everyone’s history. Perhaps that is why those of us who were alive and old enough to feel that day almost unconsciously tell our own version. It is if we are saying that we were living our lives and this horror happened. It is a way to return life to the history in the hope that the more alive the memory, the more unlikely that it’ll be repeated. With this in mind, it is strange that this year I tried to avoid hearing other people’s stories. Perhaps even that is becoming routine and, as a result, it feels like it cheapens and pushes the attacks more down the path towards the past and thus further from life.
Yet those stories need to be heard which is why I was happy this week to find an afternoon run unexpectedly soundtracked by a tale of someone else’s September 11th. To accompany one foot in front of the other, I had downloaded an almost random mix of podcasts and other free audio. So, in a way, I didn’t fully know what I was going to hear. This included a couple of recordings of David Foster Wallace reading his writing to an audience. One of the readings was a short piece he had written for Rolling Stone in the days immediately after the attacks. They had commissioned it with a short turn around which struck me as impressive because I remembered how difficult it was in those days to find language to talk about what was happening; to narrate the after where we were then living and to describe how different it was from the before that was only a few days earlier. Foster Wallace was one of the US’s most important writers at the time and, in my mind, his legend only grows because he was able to put words to the days after September 11th.
Here is a link to the original Rolling Stone piece and below is the recording of the author reading it years later.
This comfortable annual repetition has dulled the experience as it slowly transforms from an event in my life to a chapter in everyone’s history. Perhaps that is why those of us who were alive and old enough to feel that day almost unconsciously tell our own version. It is if we are saying that we were living our lives and this horror happened. It is a way to return life to the history in the hope that the more alive the memory, the more unlikely that it’ll be repeated. With this in mind, it is strange that this year I tried to avoid hearing other people’s stories. Perhaps even that is becoming routine and, as a result, it feels like it cheapens and pushes the attacks more down the path towards the past and thus further from life.
Yet those stories need to be heard which is why I was happy this week to find an afternoon run unexpectedly soundtracked by a tale of someone else’s September 11th. To accompany one foot in front of the other, I had downloaded an almost random mix of podcasts and other free audio. So, in a way, I didn’t fully know what I was going to hear. This included a couple of recordings of David Foster Wallace reading his writing to an audience. One of the readings was a short piece he had written for Rolling Stone in the days immediately after the attacks. They had commissioned it with a short turn around which struck me as impressive because I remembered how difficult it was in those days to find language to talk about what was happening; to narrate the after where we were then living and to describe how different it was from the before that was only a few days earlier. Foster Wallace was one of the US’s most important writers at the time and, in my mind, his legend only grows because he was able to put words to the days after September 11th.
Here is a link to the original Rolling Stone piece and below is the recording of the author reading it years later.
