Today is a perfectly beautiful day here in New York City. I woke up, fed my dog, worked out a bit and then stepped out into a cloudless azure blue sky. On the elevated subway in Queens I found myself catching the glances of a really cute guy and while pretending to read my latest Haruki Murakami book, glanced back. When he reached his stop, he looked right at me and a smile warmed on his face. On the subway platform, just before the doors shut he glanced back and I smiled. So ended our relationship. I'm a huge fan of the silent love affair, lasting no more than a moment, but like a photograph, each detail burned into memory forever. With days like these, the heart can't help but expand wider; beauty begets love and love begets more love. And today, in New York City, the last of the World Trade Center is removed. What remains now is simply negative space, a twin-towered hole in the sky. Business yesterday had me downtown and I walked by Ground Zero. They've just opened up a covered walkway from Liberty St. to The World Financial Center on the downtown side of the site. Most of the buildings on this side were the ones to suffer the most damage. Plywood covers the windows of all the small buildings, while the skyscrapers are covered head to toe on giant sheets of black scrim, like a goth version of a Christo installation. One building brings back to mind what the whole site looked like at first. It's front side ripped open like some giant had scooped away it's interior. The walkway itself is completely enclosed in aluminum, preventing any gawkers from looking in on the site. Even the Windows in the World Financial Center have been sandblasted over to prevent anyone from looking in. The message is clearly, 'Nothing to see here, everything is fine', but even now months after the fact, all the windows downtown are still streaked with grey soot. You can still find caked in unused crevices of masonry, the white cement and ash snow that was the WTC. The media coverage makes it seem like any day now, we'll see construction workers building in the pit that, until recently, was the largest mass grave in America. It's time to slow down and remember that the original towers were a symbol of their time, for better or worse, capturing the greed, the excess and even the hubris of the Modern Age. It was built so that it's makers would be remembered. It's time to slow down and remember that what we build on this site, will, perhaps even more so than what originally stood on that site, will be a reflection of OUR age, of OUR values and it will be how we our remembered.

posted by Japhy at 5/30/2002 01:02:00 PM || #