Cue, Once Again, Barber's Adagio for Strings

We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels. We shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.

–Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

It’s all just history now, that still incomprehensible day six years ago, history buried under history, with more awful history heaped on top of it. It gets buried deeper all the time. Rubble and ruin the central metaphor of the years since.

How, you wonder, could such a day possibly be eclipsed by something so inconsequential as the passing of time? And yet it has been eclipsed, reduced now to token, knee-jerk political justification for virtually any new outrage, and reduced as well to fodder for entertainment –sensationalized films and television movies and books. A real, jarring leviathan of a memory collectively transformed into something sordid, a lurid, almost mythological spectacle from recent history, something that happened to other people and continues to be used to explain away terrible things that continue to be visited upon other other people in elsewheres near and far.

All over the world the horrors of that day live on in brutal abstract and concrete concussion, a cruel cycle of visitations and revisitations and recrimination. But not, for the most part, here.

Americans are accomplished at nothing so much as rolling with the punches that are thrown at other people, at slowing down briefly to gawk and tsk-tsk at the wreckage before moving on. We move swiftly out from under things and right back under our own things.

Other people: the great shadow abstraction and peripheral nag of modern psychology.

We all, certainly, can find reasons to feel ashamed of ourselves. All sorts of reasons. There is really no end to our shame, and no end in sight.