Perspective: Quiet reflection may be what we need

Quiet reflection may be what we need

By DIANE ROBERTS

The television is a wilderness of words, words running across the bottom of the screen with the names of the dead, logos with variations on "America Under Attack" stuck like a B-movie title in the corner, and solemn-eyed reporters in front of smoldering cities talking, talking constantly, as if even a short silence would be unbearable.

This is when we discover that words are inadequate, inexact, mere shots in this dark night of all our souls.

Maybe quiet is what we need, a quiet in which we can begin to take it in: the burning symbols of what we thought was our unassailable power, and the thousands dead. Quiet or else some words that go beyond the constant reiteration of horror and the promise of revenge.

"Human kind cannot bear very much reality," T.S. Eliot said in Burnt Norton. And this is too much reality. We are used to watching things blow up, things burn, people running away, screaming, people dying. We see it in the movies all the time; we see it in video games; we see it in television images from Jerusalem, Bosnia, Belfast. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is news and which is entertainment.

But this was happening. For real. This was New York, and this was Washington. These two cities define who we are. New York: crowded with immigrants, stuffed with money, fast, on the make. The World Trade Center was our Pharos, our wonder of the financial world, a Babel Tower of capitalism. Washington: serene in white marble, the city that belongs to all of us, our center, with the edifices that epitomize strength and democracy. Seeing them in flames knocked the wind out of all of us in a way that even the Oklahoma City bombing could not. We are left with the question: How could anyone hate us so much?

Americans are always mystified by the anger America inspires. We cannot understand that not everyone wants to be us. We have taken self-confidence -- sometimes to the point of genius, sometimes to the point of foolishness -- and made it our national credo. We may lack the reflective abilities to deal with this unfathomable crime committed against us, a nation that sees itself as committed to doing the right thing.

Modern Americans expect to be rewarded. The Puritans who helped found this country expected to suffer. They expected to be tried, like Job, inexplicably, senselessly. Their God was usually angry. They assumed it was a bad world. We assume it's a good world, or at least it can be made good if we try hard. Instead of the Dies Irae, we have prayer vigils and memorial services, grief counseling and floral offerings. We prefer (with some notable exceptions) a loving and forgiving God.

We cannot and should not go back to the dark, afterlife-obsessed cosmology of our ancestors. But though we can see out to the edges of the universe and map the human genome we have not solved what theologians call "the problem of evil." How can a benevolent God allow such suffering? What omniscient, omnipotent creator allows such atrocities to be visited on his creation?

We have tried to banish death. We relegate it to hospitals and the back room of the funeral home. We resist it or cartoonize it (maybe this is all just a dream?) and ignore it if possible. We'll live the waking nightmare collectively on television for a while, till there are no more pictures of a building's pitiful metal skeleton or a weeping fireman or a motherless child or a politician struggling to speak with gravitas. Then we will hurry up and try to get back to "normal."

But we shouldn't. We should take time to try and understand what has happened to us. We should learn again to mourn. All the think-tank analysts and pundits in the world cannot interpret for us our own souls. We must do that for ourselves, in a silence that is not equivalent to ignorance but a striving for peace. The central voice here hardly needs words: "And let our cry come unto thee."