Religious Trauma

‘Are you watching television?’ our son-in-law asked, when we picked up the telephone. Our daughter, he told us, had been called to jury duty at City Hall, about a hundred yards from the World Trade Center. We turned on the television and watched as the second plane struck the second tower, making it obvious this was deliberate. It was hours before we learned our daughter was alive, that she had walked northward after she made it to the street—past Tribeca, Greenwich Village, Midtown, Central Park, all the way to Morningside Heights—looking back only once.

My confusion and shock momentarily took on a primal intensity, as though an unknown killer had singled out my daughter, and had struck at her through a blindspot in my world. What had happened was unthinkable. Thousands suffered what I only feared, bearing the death of loved ones that day with the same incredulity; the tidal wave of rage and grief reached far beyond stricken families, flooding the national consciousness.

The blasted Manhattan cityscape took command of the video imagery, as TV coverage fostered a national effort to absorb the shock, and hinted at ways to understand it. The images themselves became the meaning of the event: the collapsing towers, streets filled with wreckage, rescue vehicles and snaking fire hoses; the famous skyline mangled —with a foul cavity thrust between the tall buildings and the Statue of Liberty offshore.