On Tuesday, 11th of September 2001, I was just over a year into my ministry in Cambridge. I was working in my study, and when I paused to make a cup of tea shortly after 2pm I turned on the radio to hear the news, and learned that both towers of the World Trade Center had been struck by aircraft and were on fire.
It was such a shock that I immediately knew I needed human company in a place where I could see on a television what my imagination was struggling to comprehend. Leaving my study, I walked a few hundred yards down the road to Savino’s, a small family-run Italian café where I knew I would find familiar faces. I ordered my coffee and alongside other customers simply stared uncomprehendingly at the events unfolding on the television high up on the wall. I stayed there for a couple of hours until I knew my wife, Susanna, would be coming home from work. When I got back I found her, like thousands of other people, desperately trying to contact her sister who lived just a few blocks from the Twin Towers. Thankfully, her sister was physically unharmed but, like every New Yorker, she would never fully get over the horror of that day.
A quarter of a century has now passed, and over the intervening years, the world has been fundamentally reshaped by the consequences of that day and it changed the lives of many. For me, it was the moment my knowledge of religion suddenly became relevant in the wider world, and this meant I became increasingly involved in helping various secular institutions better understand how religion actually works, both for good and ill. Perhaps the most challenging project I undertook in connection with this was in 2007, when I was invited to chair a one-day conference at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, co-sponsored by NATO and the British International Studies Association (BISA), on the subject of ‘Engaging with Religion for Building Peace: The Experience of Afghanistan and Iraq.’
Yet, as time distances us from that still shocking day, I find myself feeling more and more a profound need to draw a clear distinction between something we call ‘9/11’ and the day that was Tuesday 11th of September 2001. I’ve come to think it’s vital that at no point should we use them synonymously.
You see, thanks to decades of analysis, political rhetoric, and cultural processing and reprocessing, ‘9/11’ has become a proper noun. It is now the name of an incredibly complex and conflicted story that has developed in the shadow of the actual event. Storytelling can, of course, be a way of finding healing; it’s a powerful way to extract meaning from a catastrophe. But all too often the story of ‘9/11’ has been co-opted for less than honourable and healing ends, and it quickly became a catalyst for a series of monumental mistakes by Western liberal democracies, leading to the bloody, chaotic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq I was talking about six years later in Sandhurst. What I am concerned about in this thought for the day is that if we only remember ‘9/11,’ we ignore the fact that the victims of these attacks are far greater in number than the 2,977 people who died on that fateful day. The true toll includes hundreds of thousands of other innocent lives lost in the violent interventions that followed. For all the many stories of human heroism and compassion to which it gave birth, ‘9/11’ is now a central part of a narrative of anger and retaliation by state and non-state actors who were, and are, desperate to gain or regain control over world events.
The 11th of September 2001, on the other hand, was simply another ordinary day, a Tuesday.
And here I want to draw your attention back to that day because it is vital to make visible the ordinary background of human life, without which we easily fall prey to the dangerous illusion that we are in control of world events.
But how do we return to the everyday reality of the 11th of September 2001 when every piece of footage and every memory has been so heavily coloured by the myth of ‘9/11’? Perhaps the only way we can do it together is through the lens of art, such as in the photograph taken that day by the senior Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker.
His picture shows a group of young New Yorkers sitting in a Brooklyn park, bathed in the bright late-summer sun. They appear to be chatting, relaxed. Yet, directly behind them, across the East River, a colossal cloud of smoke and dust rises into the blue sky—the remains of the Twin Towers.
Hoepker, perhaps wisely, chose not to publish the photograph in 2001, but when it finally appeared in 2006, it sparked immediate outrage. Critics saw it as an allegory of American callousness, a failure to grasp the gravity of the tragedy. However, the people in the photo later came forward to clarify that they were, in fact, in a profound state of shock and disbelief—proving, if nothing else, that you cannot photograph a feeling.
As the Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones powerfully observed on the tenth anniversary of the attacks:
‘It is the only photograph of that day to assert the art of the photographer: among hundreds of devastating pictures, by amateurs as well as professionals, that horrify and transfix us because they record the details of a crime that outstripped imagination — even Osama bin Laden dared not expect such a result — this one stands out as a more ironic, distanced, and therefore artful, image.’
Jones then adds:
‘Today, the meaning of this photograph has nothing to do with judging individuals. It has become a picture about history, and about memory. As an image of a cataclysmic historical moment it captures something that is true of all historical moments: life does not stop dead because a battle or an act of terror is happening nearby. Artists and writers have told this truth down the ages. In his painting The Fall of Icarus, the Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel depicts a peasant ploughing on as a boy falls to his death in the sea beyond: it is a very similar observation to Hoepker’s. W. H. Auden’s lines on this painting in his poem Musée des Beaux Arts apply perfectly to the photograph: ‘In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster …’
The point I want to make is that before we could analyse, interpret, or create any dangerous political myths about the attacks, there was only a background of radical, human not-knowing, and that each of us, in our own ways, experienced the same utter incomprehension as those young people in Brooklyn by the East River.
The proper noun ‘9/11’ tries to explain. It tries to regain power and control. But in doing so, it distances us from the actual moment and the people who actually died. The thousands who went to work that Tuesday morning had no grand geopolitical narrative. They had no power, no control, and no warning. They were simply living an ordinary day.
So when we stop to remember the events in New York twenty-five years ago, I think we must ask ourselves what and who exactly are we remembering and honouring? Are we remembering and honouring what our culture tells us the event meant? Or are we standing in silent, non-partisan solidarity with the ordinary men and women who were simply doing ordinary things? Somehow we must never forget a basic, fragile truth of the human condition: that even in the face of terrible disaster, as Jonathan Jones so perfectly put it in his article about Hoepker’s photograph, the young people it showed could not help being alive, and showing it.
Looking back, it makes me realise that as I left Savino’s to walk home to Susanna on that Tuesday afternoon, I almost certainly finished my last cup of coffee and, with a smile, said goodbye and thank you to the owner. After all the coffee had been good, and the company had been essential. But what would history have made of me had a famous photographer snapped my picture at that exact moment—capturing a broad smile on my face, with the smoke from the collapsed Twin Towers billowing on the television screen behind me?
The point is, I suppose, just like the young New Yorkers in the photograph, even on that terrible day I, too, could not help being alive and showing it.
