Topic Clusters
Writing in a Time of Terror: September 11, 2001*
This cluster includes an excerpt from the “9/11 Commission Report,” as well as a set of comments on catastrophe—some of them responding directly to the 9/11 attacks, and some of them from years earlier. We can read this cluster as a study in varieties of telling and response, but also as an unfinished meditation on the effects of the passage of time, and the longevity, in the collective memory, of moments of disaster.
1. John Updike, at the start of his essay written only days after the attack, observes that we must “keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.” What does he mean by that? Looking over the other comments and poems in this set, do you see some that fight successfully, and some that don’t? Years after the event, how do these responses sort out for you?
2. About three thousand people died on one day in the 9/11 attacks; about three years later, a tsunami in the South Pacific struck Thailand, Indonesia, and India, killing a quarter of a million. In 1976, an earthquake in Tangshan, China, wiped out at least 200,000 people, and possibly more than three times that number. In one two-day assault at the Battle of the Somme in World War I, 60,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded. On the web you can find information about any number of disasters, bombing raids, and slaughters that dwarf the casualty list of September 11, 2001. From any perspective, does that matter? Think about modern literature as an act of remembrance: What are the capacities and limits of the individual mind and the culture to bear witness? What are the effects of time and distance, and how, and how much, should we resist those effects?
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