In France—at least as of ten years ago, when I was last there—gratitude is still shown, sixty years later, to Americans of any age for having freed France from the Nazi grip. War monuments preside over the countryside. It is at once an eerie and peaceful sensation to walk around and through a half-destroyed bunker on the Normandy cliffs and read the plaque on a monument to American engineers, as voices of children playing in the sand in the sun's warmth drift up from below, and the wind whispers through the grasses, of past struggle and horror, of calm and hope.
Traditionally, the graduation announcements for the school where I teach carry a background picture of the original school, a lovely, ivy-clad, two-story brick building, which was torn down decades ago for the sin of not meeting new earthquake standards. Similarly, the City of Fresno tore down its original, dignified courthouse, toppling the cupola first, and built a gray, concrete, prison-like rectangle in its stead.
Man keeps trying to conquer nature. We defy gravity, the ocean, earthquakes. The human mind is, indeed a wonderful thing, in its curiosity and intellectual capacity. Yet weeds emerge in sidewalks every spring, and the abandoned blacktop soon yields to grasses and wildflowers. Perhaps man needs to spend more time trying to conquer human nature, to explore more the capacity of the heart.
At our local junior college, the proud, elegant, brick Old Administration Building, after some twenty-five years of court battles between preservationists and destructionists, was saved from the wrecking ball. Now students, faculty, and administration can again be part of a history, of a work of art, of the breezes and shadows that design the two interior courtyards.
Traditionally, the graduation announcements for the school where I teach carry a background picture of the original school, a lovely, ivy-clad, two-story brick building, which was torn down decades ago for the sin of not meeting new earthquake standards. Similarly, the City of Fresno tore down its original, dignified courthouse, toppling the cupola first, and built a gray, concrete, prison-like rectangle in its stead.
Man keeps trying to conquer nature. We defy gravity, the ocean, earthquakes. The human mind is, indeed a wonderful thing, in its curiosity and intellectual capacity. Yet weeds emerge in sidewalks every spring, and the abandoned blacktop soon yields to grasses and wildflowers. Perhaps man needs to spend more time trying to conquer human nature, to explore more the capacity of the heart.
What do we learn in building on the discoveries and accomplishments of our predecessors, rather than replacing them in their entirety with our own? Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth is enjoying a resurgence of interest with the release of its sequel, World Without End, nearly two decades later. At the center of Pillars is the construction, over a period ofo four centuries, of a Gothic cathedral, a major player also in the sequel. Europeans have had the wisdom, even sometimes during war, to allow these architectural masterpieces to stand. What if all the cathedrals had been torn down? Our children would have had the cathedral-free day they begged for when we traveled in Europe, but our fourteen-year-old would not have had Pillars of the Earth to keep him (and his mother's mind) relatively happily engaged as he waited alone in Amsterdam, where he'd traveled by himself from Parirs, for the rest of his group. We do not know the impact our decisions now, to tear down or to preserve, will have on future generations.
Before dignitaries, survivors, and anonymous onlookers, the Survivor Staircase was lifted and put on a truck to be moved to the 9/11 museum at Ground Zero. In the photos, one sees behind the stairs the surviving World Trade Center Towers. Are they not equally informative, the stairs that are detached from their raison d'etre and the still-standing skyscrapers?
I've often thought 9/11 was an emotional upheaval for my dad, that it contributed to the winding down of his life over the next ten months. He believed so deeply in man's capacities in all realms, his capacity to think, to achieve, to feel, to overcome, to be human. I believe the Saint Louis Gateway Arch represented all of this for him. The company with which he spent his career, PDM, realized Eero Saarinen's design. Pre-computer, they fabricated the materials and engineered the arch's erection, using equipment they designed and built. Man's ability to create and to problem-solve thrilled my dad, and he thought it limitless. He held patents himself, that in our computer age I can search and print from the United States Patent Office website. If only I could, as I myself live through my sixth decade, search his mind.
In City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center, James Glanz and Eric Lipton write that after the bids of Bethlehem Steel and US Steel, which were termed extortionist, were rejected, parts of the WTC were fabricated by a dozen steel companies around the country, in 1968. PDM constructed "the tridentlike forks, some of them fifty-five tons apiece, that would sit on the base columns and run to where the regular pinstripes began on the ninth floor.... It seemed that an entire nation had been mobilized to build the World Trade Center" (Glanz and Lipton 186-87). I have a hazy remembrance of looking at pictures of the remains of the WTC, of the "trident forks" still standing, of my father explaining that was the part PDM had built, of seeing in his eyes and on his face, hearing in his voice, what seemed a great, inexpressible anguish.
Poseidon, the half-man, half-fish Greek god of the sea, and his son by the sea nymph Amphitrite, Triton, each carried a trident, a three-pronged ("toothed," in Greek), long-handled spear. Poseidon caused violent, earthquake-spawning storms by striking his trident on the ocean floor. He calmed the same storms by riding his gold chariot. He was the brother of Zeus, the king of the gods, the god of thunder and lightning. What gods watched on, incapable of controlling man, as the Twin Towers were struck and collapsed?
In a rare stroke of fate, shortly after 9/11, my brother, sister, and I arrived simultaneously at our parents' home, our own family members all coincidentally otherwise occupied. We took our childhood places at the dining table, as though transported back decades, as though needing the reassurance of our childhood nuclear family.
World War II must have shortened the lives of those it did not kill, of the American soldiers who, like my father, slogged through the sand and mud, heat and cold of Northern Africa and Italy, for years. Many, like my dad, made the best of it, camouflaged the drudgery and horror with plane rides over Africa, ice cream made in helmets, favors done for friends, whether with or against Army regulations. Military or civilian, whatever nationality or social status, the humans who struggled through World War II shaped our world.
I've often thought 9/11 was an emotional upheaval for my dad, that it contributed to the winding down of his life over the next ten months. He believed so deeply in man's capacities in all realms, his capacity to think, to achieve, to feel, to overcome, to be human. I believe the Saint Louis Gateway Arch represented all of this for him. The company with which he spent his career, PDM, realized Eero Saarinen's design. Pre-computer, they fabricated the materials and engineered the arch's erection, using equipment they designed and built. Man's ability to create and to problem-solve thrilled my dad, and he thought it limitless. He held patents himself, that in our computer age I can search and print from the United States Patent Office website. If only I could, as I myself live through my sixth decade, search his mind.
In City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center, James Glanz and Eric Lipton write that after the bids of Bethlehem Steel and US Steel, which were termed extortionist, were rejected, parts of the WTC were fabricated by a dozen steel companies around the country, in 1968. PDM constructed "the tridentlike forks, some of them fifty-five tons apiece, that would sit on the base columns and run to where the regular pinstripes began on the ninth floor.... It seemed that an entire nation had been mobilized to build the World Trade Center" (Glanz and Lipton 186-87). I have a hazy remembrance of looking at pictures of the remains of the WTC, of the "trident forks" still standing, of my father explaining that was the part PDM had built, of seeing in his eyes and on his face, hearing in his voice, what seemed a great, inexpressible anguish.
Poseidon, the half-man, half-fish Greek god of the sea, and his son by the sea nymph Amphitrite, Triton, each carried a trident, a three-pronged ("toothed," in Greek), long-handled spear. Poseidon caused violent, earthquake-spawning storms by striking his trident on the ocean floor. He calmed the same storms by riding his gold chariot. He was the brother of Zeus, the king of the gods, the god of thunder and lightning. What gods watched on, incapable of controlling man, as the Twin Towers were struck and collapsed?
In a rare stroke of fate, shortly after 9/11, my brother, sister, and I arrived simultaneously at our parents' home, our own family members all coincidentally otherwise occupied. We took our childhood places at the dining table, as though transported back decades, as though needing the reassurance of our childhood nuclear family.
World War II must have shortened the lives of those it did not kill, of the American soldiers who, like my father, slogged through the sand and mud, heat and cold of Northern Africa and Italy, for years. Many, like my dad, made the best of it, camouflaged the drudgery and horror with plane rides over Africa, ice cream made in helmets, favors done for friends, whether with or against Army regulations. Military or civilian, whatever nationality or social status, the humans who struggled through World War II shaped our world.
It was as though a beginning. Peace has been tenuous since, and too often in too many places nonexistent. But by and large, humans are managing to muddle through, and there is always grace among us, the grace of an old person's wisdom; the grace of a child's innocence, whether rich or impoverished; the grace of nature and man's quest to understand and cherish it; the grace of human invention and man's quest to harness ideas to imbue, not destroy, life; the grace of creativity.
To have left the Survivors' Staircase where it stood would have been the most powerful reminder of humanity in all its facets. When we are knocked about, knocked down, it is in the grace of this human spirit with which we are endowed that we climb from the suffering and tragedy and move forward. In doing so, we need to remember the past and build on it.
To have left the Survivors' Staircase where it stood would have been the most powerful reminder of humanity in all its facets. When we are knocked about, knocked down, it is in the grace of this human spirit with which we are endowed that we climb from the suffering and tragedy and move forward. In doing so, we need to remember the past and build on it.
Thank you for sharing about Grandpa. I didn't know his connection to the Twin Towers and wish I had the opportunity to talk to him about them. God - how I hope we can recapture Grandpa's understanding of man and all the good things we are capable of.
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