Echoes: Shakespeare and the new World Trade Center.

Shakespeare mostly wrote in meters. He also mostly wrote in dia-meters, or diametrics, phrases on either side of a diameter, often in opposition. He knew we humans, a debating species by nature, instinctively listen for them, hear them in those careful enough to deliver them with their intended weight.

This plays out most obviously perhaps, in the Beethoven Fifth of Shakespearean monologues, To be, or not to be.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. 

Contrast 'to be' with 'or not to be.' Contrast 'whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune' with 'Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.' Contrast 'or by opposing' with 'end them.' Contrast 'to die' with 'to sleep.' And then contrast the way he goes on to define and differentiate kinds of sleep, a resting in peace, say, versus a tormented endless dream. 

I invite you to scour Shakespeare's texts. He uses this 'this or that' construct throughout the entire canon. And that is only part of his genius. Because he knew we would hear that. He knew that these diametrically opposed notions would reverberate in our heads, and that we would absorb an enormous density of thought as a result. For you teachers, remember: Like Beethoven's Fifth, Shakespeare's plays were meant to be heard, not read. But if you read them with this paradigm in mind, they are eminently more readable. They are also much easier to memorize, by the way. Shakespeare helped his actors as much as he helped his audience.

(Let me tangentially add here that Hamlet falls off the verse in this first line. If the line read, 'To be or not to be that is the quest,' that is the iambic pentameter Shakespeare establishes. By adding one more syllable, '-tion,' he tells us--and the actor playing Hamlet--something is wrong with our poor ponderous Prince. Indeed.)

This was on my mind today as I wandered through the plaza of the new World Trade Center. 

I walked up the gently sloping stairs of the new Liberty Park to survey the ground below. And all around me I saw contrasts. The stonework of the paths is laid out in parallel lines, an echo of the hallmark outer columns of the original Towers One and Two. But they lie horizontally, of course, a reminder of the fallen. They are punctuated by harsh angular gardens, reminding one of the harsh jagged twisted tons of steel that punctuated thousands of our loved ones. Flowering inside these beds however are blooms and grasses stirring softer senses, like pillows of comfort. Splendid stone and steel accents are interspersed among wooden benches that feel more inviting, more human. And all this angularity leads into the comforting round arms of Santiago Calatrava's St. Nicholas Church, currently under construction.

I looked out onto the hundreds of leafy green oak trees giving shade to hundreds of visitors, how they yielded only to the waterfalls, how the waterfalls remind one of the gravity of that day fifteen years ago, but softened one's harshest memories with their coolness, their gentle sounds. I looked up at the extraordinary crystalline towers rising overhead, how the architecture at their bases echoes those outer-wall columns of the original Towers One and Two as well, how they stand guard over the emptiness of sunken waterfalls, how "Reflecting Absences" is in itself a diametric.

I looked across at The Oculus, the transportation hub that is both spiky and white, piercing and virginal, a parabola of stillness that somehow evokes movement, the flapping wing of a peace dove at the center of an act of war. 

And I took in David Childs' new Tower One of the new World Trade Center. Each of its four sides rise up in defiance, drawing our eyes to the heights of humanity, to the heavens, while each of its four corners draw our eyes down to earth, in remembrance perhaps, in a nod to our humility, a call instead to humbleness, angular reminders of everything it means to be soft and tender in community.

Not everyone is in love with the new World Trade Center. And I have yet to form a full opinion, honestly, allowing it the time it will take to flower into its fruition. But if one looks carefully for everything I think was intended, I believe its echoes of 'What was once' bouncing off 'What has come' fusing into 'What will be' in our minds might, in our minds, be as satisfying as the shared sadness, devastation, and resolution we feel together when tragedy corrects itself and all is set right in Denmark.

September 10th. My annual reflection.

As the dawn rose on August 7th, 1974, a lithe figure stepped out into the space between Towers One and Two of the brand new World Trade Center. 

For the next forty-five minutes, he made eight passes between the towers on a cable barely visible from the ground carrying a 55-pound balancing pole of his own design and even lying down at one point on nothing it seemed to the delight of a mob of commuters 1,350 feet below.

Philippe Petite turned 25 the next week and for his birthday, New York City dropped the litany of charges leveled against him, consigning him to a mandated performance for children in Central Park, provided he use a net.

This extraordinary event in New York City history has been pushed into a smaller corner of our collective memories by the terrible events that would transpire on that site twenty-seven years later. And it was foolish perhaps. But as we approach the fifteenth anniversary of the worst day in my life, I'd like to recall this day, when a bit of derring-do captured our imaginations and cemented a vision of joy paving the way for many days of joy over many years to come at the original World Trade Center. 

Our memories of loss might better be sprinkled with any number of happy memories that give loss its center and its meaning, a testament to our extraordinarily human resilience when it comes time to cope.