The Big Easy on a Hard Day
“The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges…. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sounds of the jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.” —“Here Is New York” (1949) by E.B. White, Cornell ‘21
Today, in New Orleans at the Fall Conference for Community Foundations, is about paying tribute. How are we to remember our heroes—alive and dead—who shape our memory of that darkest of days on that brilliantly clear morning?
I remember my breakfast at Popovers on 86th St. I was in a booth facing Amsterdam. The waiter mentioned that a plane hit the World Trade Center. Then Joyce’s urgent face in the window. We escorted our 4-year-old daughter home from school, her one-month-old sister in tow, and I spent the day watching TV, watching the city crumble and a nation unite.
The eerie quiet in a loud city.
Then movement. But little sound as thousands of people walked the wide avenues heading North. Direction certain. Destinations unknown.
Landlines connected us with friends and family; texting was rare, and Facebook three years in the future. For two days, we watched as the world watched. From a rooftop I saw smoke but little else. On Thursday, we went to Union Square where thousands joined with candles, song, and prayer. A roll of white drawing paper was filled with tributes and art—talent and emotion demonstrating a humanity unimaginable months before, or hours before.
We lost so many. A day of no degree of separation in America. We will not forget friends and colleagues in the anonymity of thousands departed. We will take time to reread obituaries and tributes. We will honor their memory.
On college campuses, scholars work toward a peace borne in teaching, research, and service. Faculty discover ways to feed the world, students build schools, alumni treat those in need.
On college campuses, new students are so much more than names and resumes and hometowns. They are the souls of a new generation separated from my days on the hill by decades—and a millennium—but connected to us with shared educational and life ambitions.
A millennium began with tragedy and doubt. But today, a decade plus one year later, we can taste and must embrace optimism on this anniversary and the days ahead. We do what we do to leave this world better than we found it.
“Life can be understood only backwards, but it must be lived forward.”—Søren Kieregaard, Danish philosopher
Daniel Mansoor, Cornell ‘79, adapted this blog from a memorial scholarship fundraising letter to his university classmates.
