The Windowless Room Originally published in The Bookpress, 2001, right after the terror attacks. It seems embarrassingly naive to me now, but here it is, nevertheless. Everybody in America has a story now. Some of them are horrible or heroic or both, and we have all heard these on the radio and on television, and hearing them we feel sad or proud or both, and we’re glad it wasn’t us who died or who lost a husband or wife or parent, or who had to make that terrible choice in that final moment. We’re fortunate that there aren’t more of these stories, the stories of first-hand loss. Then there are the close-call stories. Many of us have heard these from our friends in New York or Washington. “I worked on the 93rd floor, but I was on a cigarette break.” “I worked next door; we were hiding in the basement when the first tower fell.” “I quit my job a week ago Wednesday.” “I thought she was dead, and then the phone rang and it was her.” Hearing these, we feel fate screaming past at a thousand miles an hour, on its way to meet somebody else. We either sense the terrible randomness of life, or we feel blessed, charmed. But most of us are lucky: our stories are of the how-I-found-out variety. “I was doing the laundry, and when I came upstairs they interrupted the music.” “My mother called and asked me if I’d heard.” “My son called and told me he was all right, and I said ‘What do you mean?’” “I had a funny feeling and turned on the TV.” We’ll be telling and hearing these stories for the rest of our lives, because they document a shared moment of astonishment and fear, something that does not happen often in this nation of nice houses and fine restaurants and big cars. The stories are as suspenseful as a mantelpiece rifle in a drawing-room mystery; we know there’s going to be a punch line, a moment of recognition, and the part of us that loves that moment is sure to be satisfied. They allow us a glimpse into the private lives of other people, and how those lives were shaken by other Americans’ deaths; this is something we feel we must know. We leave these exchanges feeling a little bit euphoric, a little bit lucky, a little bit sick of ourselves and our attachment to our story, which after all is not a story of personal heroism or sacrifice, but a story of how our normal lives were interrupted by a distant tragedy. The stories aren’t especially meaningful, except as they remind us that we actually had lives to be interrupted. For most Americans, these lives are pretty good. For a lot of us, they are excellent lives, some of the most comfortable, the least risky ever lived in the history of humankind. We’re grateful to be reminded of this, or ought to be, anyway. Here’s my story: I was sleeping peacefully during the terrorist attack, in the exit row of an airplane en route from Syracuse to Chicago. I was going on a tour to publicize a book I wrote. Planning this tour had been my main occupation over the weeks preceding the trip; I’d arranged for musicians and artists and little theatrical presentations to accompany my readings, and I’d packed certain clothes in my suitcase that I thought I’d look cool in, and I’d practiced my patter in my head, and all of these things seemed incredibly important and consequential. My plane would have been close to landing when the attack happened, and so it reached its destination without incident. Exiting, I thanked the pilot. This was a United flight. I don’t remember him looking at all concerned. Nothing at O’Hare was out of the ordinary. I checked my gate. I bought an Egg McMuffin. While eating, I walked around, looking for a belt, to replace the one I had forgotten back home. I found one, but it cost twenty-five dollars. Twenty-five dollars for a belt! Forget it! That’s what I was busy thinking about: I couldn’t believe they’d try to charge me twenty-five bucks for a belt. By this time, I now know, the towers had been on fire for half an hour. When I returned to my gate, everything had changed. All flights were delayed. The TV monitors that incessantly broadcast CNN had gone blank. The clerks at the United desk were crying. On their advice, I rented a car, quick. I was supposed to read in Iowa that night, so I drove to Iowa, listening to the radio all the way. That’s how I found out all that had happened. When I got to my hotel, I turned on the TV and saw what everybody else had already been seeing for six hours. I watched, mesmerized, for a long time. Then I called the bookstore to tell them sorry the reading didn’t work out. “It’s okay,” they said. “Where are you?” “Iowa.” “Really? Where in Iowa?” “Iowa City. The Sheraton.” “What!” And then, “All right! The reading’s on!” I didn’t have the heart to say no. That night, I showed up at the bookstore and sat behind a microphone, before an audience of three people. Reading from my work, I felt the way I do when I have to get up in the middle of the night to change a diaper: exhausted and not entirely mentally present, as I touch something disgusting and then wring it out. * I think a lot of writers—artists of any stripe, I suppose, but I’ll stick to writers—felt that way on September 11, even if they weren’t delivering a public reading. In calmer times, it’s easy to convince ourselves that what we do behind our notebook or typewriter or computer is worthwhile. We feel a part of something large and old, the endeavor of literature. Regardless of how good we think we are, we feel connected to Joyce, to Shakespeare, to guttural mumblers in caves, narrating mammoth hunts. But that week, we were worthless. Doctors, as always, were important, and firemen, and police. Clergy. Senators. Telephone operators. Writers, though: nope. People were not sitting around at home that week, enjoying novels or poems; no one, myself included, was interested. The collapsing buildings always interfered, imposing themselves upon the neat columns of text. And as for my own work: the very thought of returning to my novel-in-progress, to my unfinished short stories, embarrassed and repulsed me. My friend, a poet, felt the same way. His unfinished poems, he said, were like relics from a dead world. He wanted to throw them out. But, he wondered, what sort of response would that be? Reacting to catastrophe with a miniature flourish of destruction? As if such a vain and self-important gesture would comfort anyone’s pain, even his own. No, he would keep them, set them aside, in the hope that someday they might seem meaningful again. * Here’s the thing: sometimes my country really, really enrages me. Sometimes, before the attack, I would hear an item on the news and, in response, would pound my fists on the kitchen counter and shout, “I hate this country!” In fact, I love this country. I’ll never leave. But, like a lot of people who think about such things, I don’t like our foreign policy. I don’t like our avarice, or our arrogance, or our cultural emptiness or our moral turpitude. In the years leading up to the attack, especially this past year, I have found myself getting angrier and angrier, have found myself boiling over more and more often. And then, here came some people who hated many of the same things about America that I did, and exercised their hatred by killing more than six thousand of its citizens. I think this is why liberals like me are so stunned; even, for some of us, to the point of temporarily approving of a President we can’t stand. It is as if our own worst emotions have been snatched away, perverted, and gruesomely acted upon. There are people who died in the attacks whose lives, just a month ago, a lot of us would have pointed to as examples of everything that’s wrong with America: the SUV-driving, the cell-phone-yammering, the day-trading and money-grubbing! And now these people are dead, and their families are grieving, and of course they did nothing to deserve it. That’s the difference between our disdain and the disdain of the terrorists. In this country, a representative democracy, we recognize the worth of the individual. We know that if we were put into a windowless room with this American stereotype, any stereotype, our social-profiling exercise would collapse. We might find out about our day-trader’s mother, or his dog, or his children. We would learn that he knits, or makes raspberry jam every September. We would find something about him to like. And because we know this, our disdain is productive: we channel our emotions not into violence but into work, into helping poor people or protesting Wal-Mart or writing a manifesto. In America, we don’t have to kill people we can’t stand. We are comfortable. We have options. Terrorists, on the other hand, are people without options. They are powerless people who have been given power—the power to hurt their enemies, the power to get closer to their God—by somebody with money and hatred to spare. And why should they turn this power down, when it’s the only thing they’ve got? They will cast their fight in terms of good versus evil—a holy war, in other words—to give their actions moral weight in their own minds, and they’ll go to their deaths expecting to emerge in Heaven. We believe, of course, that they are wrong. For this reason, our country must not fight its own holy war. We cannot cast this conflict in terms of good and evil, thus giving ourselves license, as the good guys, to do whatever we wish. Look: there is no morally pure response to violence, no shining path out of the darkness. To do nothing, of course, would be wrong, as it would put our citizens in greater danger, and open up the free world to more violence. But to do too much would also be wrong, because innocent people—people whose lives are not anywhere near as good as ours—would be killed. Whatever our country does, it will be both right and wrong, the way the bombing of Hiroshima was both right and wrong, ending a terrible war, yet slaughtering thousands of blameless bystanders. We can only hope that what we do is more right than wrong. This is not what people want to hear right now, and not what the President wants to tell us. But it is not simply an American privilege not to see things in black and white; now, it is our obligation. To oversimplify this conflict, to regard the American response as, in our President’s hastily retracted word, a “crusade,” is to succumb to desperation. America is not desperate; it is strong. We must take the time to acknowledge the ambiguity of what happened, and of what we are about to do. * And this, finally, is where art comes in. Ambiguity is its subject. Moral confusion, not moral certitude, is what art is about. The Iliad, the greatest war book ever written, is not about a battle between good and evil, it is about the moral ambiguity of violence. Consider the end of that story: Achilles, hero of the victorious Greeks, at last kills Hector, the Trojan hero. Troy is about to be sacked. But Achilles, driven mad by bloodlust, drags Hector’s corpse around and around the city, as horrified citizens peer over its walls: a desecration that seals Achilles’s own fate. This is no story for stirring the troops to action; there will be speeches for that. But consider that the Iliad, not the rhetoric of war, is what has reached us from the ancient world, is what the civilizations that followed it deemed worth preserving. They understood, as we must in a time of rising anger, the worth of reflecting upon the stories of the past. Already, America and its allies seem to sense the necessity of making the right decision; as I write this, no indiscriminate actions have been taken. We should be pleased by this, because the recent history of our country does not feature a lot of careful thinking and military restraint. If you think you know what your government ought to do, you should tell it. And if, in the fullness of time, the American response proves to have been more wrong than right, and if you are able, then you ought to write about it, and hope that somebody, in some dark corner of the future, will read what you wrote. That night in Iowa, after I finished reading, one of my three listeners approached me: a young woman, maybe a graduate student, she had asked no questions and made no comments. But as the others left, she thanked me for reading, told me it had meant a lot to her, and took my hand and held it. It wasn’t that what I had read was so terrific, or even that I had done a very good job reading it. I hadn’t. But someone had responded to the fact of literature, to its continued existence in the face of actual and terrible events. And it’s true: literature is still here. It isn’t going to go away. On the contrary, it may be the only thing that lasts from our culture, the thing that people of the future will judge us by. I am not kidding myself here: novel-writing is not going to stamp out terrorism. But, in an essentially secular nation like ours, art helps to shape our moral sense; it exercises the imagination that gives us empathy, and therefore judiciousness and restraint. And so, those of us who make art ought to keep making it. We will: people always do, even in the face of far greater tragedies than ours. We’ll take out our unfinished poems and stories and paintings, the music we stopped playing, the dances and plays we abandoned; and if they seem irrelevant, we’ll fix them, or else we’ll create something new. If we are able, then let it be our duty. We should let our art be the windowless room where we can confront the truth, no matter how ugly it is, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. c2001 by J. Robert Lennon.