We drank our morning coffee while shocked newscasters explained that a passenger jet had struck a tower of the World Trade Center-deliberately it would seem. Then, as we conversed quietly and watched, unbelievably, the second jet struck the other tower.
We watched that unfolding tragedy dumbstruck and heart-wrenched; we witnessed the collapse of the towers, heard about people jumping out of windows to escape death by burning. Then, having lives still available to live, we both headed off to our high-tech jobs about 11 o'clock that morning.
I cannot help but think of W.H. Auden's poem, Musée de Beaux Arts:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. . .
I am not sure there is a finer poem in the English language that captures the spirit of tragedy and our inability to feel truly the pain and suffering of others. Suffering happens while life goes on; we continue to drink coffee and talk with our own living loved ones. We take showers and dress and comb our hair. . ".walking dully along."
There is a car to drive, a living to make. Tragedy and death become just another memory that we dust off in our minds now and then. We all feel something; some of us are more in touch with their feelings than others or can express that sorrow more easily.
However, grief is too personal an emotion for most of us to experience with strangers; spirit for its own mysterious reasons reserves that powerful emotion for close friends and relations.
In that regard, I shared some of my feelings and experiences of that day in Reflections on Tragedy and Healing.
In that essay, I mentioned that for good or ill, we, human beings, usually cannot really feel the depth of the pain of other beings, and remembered Science Officer Spock's relevant statement from a Star Trek episode. He observed that the history of the human race might have been less bloody if humans could feel the totality of the suffering of others, not just our own personal sorrows.
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