What I wrote that day

Eight years ago today, Mr. Improbable and I had been living together for a month. I was working four days a week at Harvard as the communications manager for a software-implementation project. I was also finishing my dissertation on the psychology of narrative — why we read what we do, and how we tell the story of our own lives. In the spring of 2002, I would become a “Dr.” and a “Mrs.” within a few months of each other.

Eight years ago today, I still knew that I’d better keep writing something besides academic jargon and instructions to end users on how to access the new system, or my skills would atrophy. Eight years ago, it wasn’t as easy to get a blog started as it is today, so I kept a journal instead.

Eight years ago today, I wrote this:

I have been in a dangerous state of non-motivation lately, not wanting to deal with the dissertation or anything related to it—i.e., this diary. I’ve been alternating between reproaching myself for my faithlessness, swearing to get this on the web soon so that I’ll have no excuse not to do my entry every day, and telling myself that it doesn’t matter, with all I’ve done lately I can afford to slack off for a week, I’ll begin again next Monday.

Then this morning the world changed.

There are psychologists who study “flashbulb memories”—those memories that burn into the consciousness of an entire culture, that give rise to the question “where were you when”—when Kennedy was shot, when the Challenger went down, when the OJ verdict was announced. And what they’ve found is that, though the memories feel profound and authoritative, they are in fact as fragile and changeable as any other memory. Ask a person the day after The Event what happened, and you get one story; ask them six months later, and it has changed. Those who were alone say they were with friends. Those who were numb remember searing pain.

I don’t remember, even now, how I heard. I was at work, catching up on e-mails and checking the web for news as I do in the morning, and Marc called, and somehow I heard it from him or from a colleague’s shocked announcement over the cube wall or perhaps I saw it online, but then there was shouting back and forth as we all told each other what we knew, and everyone was on the phone to someone else and yelling their news across the cubes and yelling back to the rest of us in the office.

Another hour or two of this, and pacing while the news websites slowly, slowly loaded, and I went home. Not because I felt in danger—despite a few hysteric pronouncements, I certainly didn’t think Harvard would be a target, and anyway if it were I’d not be much safer at home, six blocks away—but to be with Marc, and to see the news. And to see those towers down and think, “No.”

No.

The World Trade Centers are gone. I don’t know why it’s that thought, and that combination of words, more than any other, that brings me to the edge of tears. The human toll is greater, and more meaningful—I’ve have given up the Empire State Building too, and the Golden Gate Bridge, and let them fill in the Grand Canyon with styrofoam peanuts while they were at it, to save those lives. But there is something so egregious about the destruction of the skyline. It’s like those countries where rejected men scar women with acid, destroying their beauty, turning their glory to shame. Human beings die, but we build things, create great gorgeous improbable things, to live after us. Destroying those is a blow to the spirit as well as the heart.

Marc and I sit on the couch, holding hands, watching the news for hours. Occasionally one of us gets up to check e-mail. Sometime in the afternoon Marc decides we should take a walk, and we do, and I feel a little sanity ebb back in: there’s still sun and cats on porches and my new Rockport shoes feel good—until we see the plane overhead and Marc says, “Look, a plane,” because there aren’t supposed to be any, and I realize how many things there are to think about now that there didn’t used to be.

There’s a school near our house and you can hear the children playing. I don’t really know at what age a child can be old enough to realize what happened today, to realize that it’s not a movie, not a “far away” thing. But I do know that whatever they realize, they don’t know that this is not the way it’s supposed to be. They don’t know the unwritten rule that America is never, ever, supposed to be attacked. In a strange way it’s like the election fiasco last fall, the sense of wrongness, of this-can’t-happen-here, the sense that the rules have changed. But for these kids, it can happen here. And even if it never happens again, it will change their assumptions about the world, it will make them a different generation, it will separate them from older brothers and sisters and, maybe, lovers, the way being pre- or post-Watergate separates Marc and me.

Dare I relate this to my research? Oh, yes. Until today America was one kind of story, a triumphal story about wealth and unquestioned belief in our own goodness. For many, we were a romance, in the classic literary sense of the term as used by Northrop Frye: the quest of an extraordinary people going from one glorious adventure to the next. For others, we were a comedy: the struggle of workaday folk to make a living and a life, enjoy simple pleasures and avoid the absurd traps of fate and their own foolishness.

We may come back to believing in one of these stories again. I wonder how, because I think the only myth that can get us through a crisis this huge is the “romance” story, and the tawdriness of politics and dissolution of a shared set of reference points—religious, epistemological, aesthetic—have done permanent damage to our ability to see ourselves as a romantic hero of a nation. Even those who cling to this myth today ascribe it only to the “Greatest Generation,” which of course so inexplicably raised the present lot of self-absorbed, self-loathing Boomers. America may well only work as a comedy now, and something just happened that is not supposed to happen in a comedy, where things can bend but cannot break.

What story will be left to tell?

Eight years later, I’m asking that question even more intently, even more despairingly.

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