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to eat the unborn). It reminds me of thiswhole, unlovely decade, which starteddowntown, and made us all monstrous,me as much as anybody. I was for the war,at first. Later, I was pleased when Presi-dent Obama promised to commit moretroops to Afghanistan, not because Ithought it would end that war but be-

cause I hoped it would win him the elec-tion. I sat at dinner parties and felt envi-ous of people who had not supported the

war, as if whether or not a lot of armchairintellectuals did or did not support a war

was what the war was actually about. Fora few Google-eyed hours, I thought thatSarah Palin was not Trigs mother. Therise of the Internet dovetailed with thistribalism. You could pass a decade online

without ever hearing from the other.About one thing, though, we could all

agree: everything had changed. Or had it?The 9/11 perpetrators wanted a world inwhich (their version of ) religious belieftrumped all other concerns. But in the real

world our concerns are necessarily diverse:we must attend school and find work,provide for children, look after parents.And in these matters we cannot avoid oneanother for long. Of course, mixed com-munities are not without tensionsnosuch community exists. (Relative racialand cultural homogeneityas Northern

Ireland knowsis no guarantee of peace.)But we have many common causes andpriorities. Its to be noted that class meantlittle to the terrorists: they saw only twohuman categories, believer and heathen.Here on earth, poverty and privilege crossthe religious and the cultural divide. Looka little closer at the recent CCTV footage,in London: we riot together, and together

we clean the streets.Last Christmas, standing in an apart-

ment building in New York, I was struck

by a hallway where papier-mch Stars ofDavid and holy crosses came together in adecorative seasonal theme. Here thesepeople of the book (whose religious textsoverlap and divide as deeply as either text

with the Koran) lived peaceably in thesame space, finding one anothers religionsby turns amusing, irrational, beautiful,banal. What enabled it? It took genera-tions; it passed through periods of un-speakable horror; sometimes people for-got, sometimes they forgave, and they didboth these things imperfectly. Practicalmatters helped. General economic parity,difficult acts of good will on both sides,

city, having lost so much, made a fetishof what little it had found.

The idea for a substitute at St. Peterscame about by happenstance. Six yearsago, Krawczyk sculpted other crossesone for a church in Palm Springs, an-other for his alma mater, the DelbartonSchool, in Morristown, New Jersey

and had a few left over. His fathers girl-friend gave one as a gift to a Catholicfriend, who mentioned it while havingdinner with Cardinal Egan, who, at thetime, was the Archbishop of New York.Before long, Krawczyk had a commis-sion from St. Peters and then, once he

was done, an occasion for a Dolorosanroad trip through the heartland. Wher-ever he stopped, during his three-weektrip, people flocked to his cross and vol-unteered their September 11th experi-

ences, very few of which were first or sec-ond hand. A lot of the time, they werecrying and sobbing, he recalled last

week. They wouldnt even touch thecross. It was almost a religious experiencefor them. He couldnt decipher whetherthis was because of the cross itself

which had a shiny, undulating surfacethat brought to mind Umberto Boccioni,or the Terminator T-1000or the ter-rible event to which it was to pay tribute.At any rate, he said, once we got to New

York, there were no more tears.Instead, there were rituals of civic

mourningmotorcycle escorts, firehousevisits, litigation. As he prepared to mounthis sculpture at St. Peters, a group calledthe American Atheists sued a range ofpublic and private entities, from the PortAuthority to the governor of New Jersey,over the inclusion, in an exhibition onstate-owned land, of the original I-beamcross. The gist was that the cross, as anovertly Christian symbol, privileged one

religion over many others, in a settingwhere perhaps none were appropriate.(If there had to be symbols at the mu-seum, the Atheists suggested that theirsmight be an atom.) Amid the jeer-ing that greeted the lawsuitthe dis-dain echoed some of the hubbub, last

year, over the so-called Ground ZeroMosquenonbelievers everywhereasked themselves, Is this bad for theatheists?, as they again scraped upagainst the question of whether theUnited States is a Christian nation,and whether the events of September11th were part of a larger holy war.

1

allTOgETHERNOW

This summer, Jon Krawczyk, a sculp-tor who lives in Malibu, zigzaggedacross the country in a Chevy pickupwith a fifteen-foot-tall steel cross strappedto the bed. It was a replacement for thecrossed I-beams found amid the ruinsafter the towers collapsedthat famoushunk of metal which rescuers raised overthe rubble, as a talisman and a beacon.Later, it was blessed by a Catholic priest,then installed across the street at St. Pe-ters Church, and finally, in July, trans-

ferred to the 9/11 Memorial Museum,which opens to the public next year. The

and a democratic country in which the ap-parently impossible has the freedom tohappen. It is not a perfect relationshiptheres no such thingand it took twothousand years to get this far. We forget:these things take time. Let us realize thearc of the moral universe is long but itbends toward justice, said Martin Luther

King, Jr., who presided over anothermeeting of supposedly irreconcilable peo-ples. Not everyone is a monster.

Zadie Smith

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Joe Daniels, the president of the me-morial and museum, said, The crossmeets the criteria of an authentic artifactthat tells a critical part of the story of theevent: that of the nine-month recoveryperiod. The significance of the cross,he acknowledged, was spiritual but non-denominational. Last week, the Atheists

suit was moved to federal court. Bothcrosses, accidental and contrived, re-mained in place.

The evolving consecration of GroundZero has been tortuous and fraught, oc-casionally a flea-circus pantomime of thehistorical and global frictions that, di-rectly or indirectly, rendered this patch ofManhattan eligible for consecration inthe first place. Constituencies of manystripes, and in many funny hats, have as-serted some claim or another to speak for

it, or to have it speak for them. Nonethe-less, from the start people have tried tobe inclusive. Two weeks after the terror-ist attacks, Rudy Giuliani staged a prayergathering at Yankee Stadium, withOprah Winfrey as the ecumenical m.c.All the major faiths of New York City(and, therefore, of the world) were rep-resented, except one. Nobody invited aBuddhist.

The president of the citys BuddhistCouncil at the time was a Japanese monk

named T. K. Nakagaki. He was alsothe abbot at the New York BuddhistChurch, a seventy-three-year-old templeon Riverside Drive. Noting the over-sight, Nakagaki persuaded the othermembers of the council, typically an ac-quiescent bunch, to raise a ruckus. Theysent the Mayor a letter of grievance andbegan organizing ceremonies of theirowninterfaith undertakings that in-cluded, but did not rely on the hospital-ity of, their Abrahamic counterparts. If

the Buddhist point of view was to beheard, the Buddhists, against their na-ture, were going to have to assert it moreloudly. This was New York.

At the entrance of the New YorkBuddhist temple there is another war-scorched relic, a bronze statue of Shinran,the founder of Nakagakis sect. (LikeKrawczyks cross, it is fifteen feet tall.)

The statue had originally stood on a hilloverlooking the city of Hiroshima. It sur-

vived the explosion of the atomic bomb,although its front, seared by the blast, isstill visibly discolored. It was brought toAmerica after the war, in the spirit of

never-again, and mounted during a cere-mony, as it happens, on September 11,

1955. For many years, the temple hadheld a small service on the anniversary ofthe Hiroshima bombing, commemorat-ing the dead and praying for peace. Na-kagaki, who came to the United States in1985 and became the abbot in 1994,moved the service outside to the foot ofthe statue of Shinran, and invited religiousleaders from around the city.

Forty-nine days after the terrorist at-tacks, Nakagaki organized a Buddhist in-terfaith remembrance in Union Square.

And then, in the summer of 2002, he puttogether a 9/11-commemoration cere-mony downtown, on the occasion of the

Japanese midsummer memorial celebra-tion called obon, which concluded withthe release into the Hudson River of ahundred and eight floating rice-paper lan-terns, not with the names of the dead onthem, as is customary in Japan, but with

various messages for peace. Securing per-mits was tricky, owing to security aroundGround Zero (the solution was to start atSt. Peters and keep moving around) andthe use of open flame (regardless of thefact that these were candles floating on

Ill have the egg-yellow omelette.

millions of gallons of water). In 2004, theservice was moved to September 11th,

and Nakagaki enlisted the New YorkKayak Club, which provided dock accessto the water, at Pier 40, and whose mem-bers paddled out to round up the lanternsbefore they drifted into the Harbor. In2006, organizers switched to battery-powered candles. Last year, there wereabout a thousand attendees, including,presumably, some atheists.

Afterward, Nakagaki stepped down asthe head of the Buddhist Church to com-plete his doctorate at the New York

Theological Seminary. (The subject ofhis dissertation is the swastikathe de-basement and possible resurrection of anancient spiritual symbol.) But he still pre-sides over the lantern ceremony, withthe help of the Interfaith Center of New

York. Each religious leader (Jewish,Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Shinto,Afro-Caribbean) has a minute in whichto say a prayerthe Sikhs, notably, pro-

vide the foodand then Nakagaki chantsas the congregants make their way downthe dock to release the floating lanterns,

with the twin beams of light from GroundZero as a backdrop. The panorama of

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1

WizaRdS

L ike many people, I watched 9/11 ontelevision from a thousand milesaway. Also like many people, I found my-

self asking, among the dozens of terrifiedquestions that crossed my mind, Do Iknow anyone who works in the World

Trade Center? I was pretty sure that Ididnt. And I was about to relax ever soslightly and guiltily, when I suddenly re-memberedwait a minutethat mybrother worked there. Or had. Hed beenthere during the first bombing, in 1993,and I wasnt certain whether the state ad-ministrative office he worked for was stillsituated there.

It turned out that his office had movedjust across the street. My brother was inthe W.T.C. subway station when the first

tower was hit, and, after the second onewas hit and the adjacent buildings wereevacuated, my brother, covered in ash,and unreachable by anyone, walked eighthours home to Queens. The next day?He returned to work and sat there at hisdesk for two hours, waiting for others toshow upuntil at last it became clear

that not a single other person was goingto. And so he left. The cough he alreadypossessed became permanently worse.

When I think about his returning tohis empty office and just sitting there, Ilike to imagine that it was not out of someheartbreakingly robotic sense of duty thatmight run in our family but, instead, dueto the universal human desire to return tothe fictional normal; the normal and theeveryday are often amazingly unstoppa-ble, and what is unimaginable is the ces-

sation of them. The world is resilient,and, no matter what interruptions occur,people so badly want to return to theirlives and get on with them. A veneer ofcivilization descends quickly, like a shin-ing rain. Dust is settled.

In the past ten years, we have donethat only sort of. The absurd, brutal cycleof revenge that 9/11 was part of, that all

war is part of, has continued. (Terrorismis arguably real war waged by stateless andunderfunded communitiesor at least

the gullible, restless young men withinthem.) Opportunists who wait for acts of

war in order to take material advantage ofthe chaos will quickly set up their schemesand profiteering. They showed up for

workperhaps not the very next day butsoon enough, and the invasion of Iraqensued, the anniversary of which is lesslikely to be remarked upon or even pre-cisely remembered. (Politics, as DavidRieff has written, is the ghost at the ban-quet of any national commemoration.)

Instead? This year, the death of Osamabin Laden was cheered by many mem-bers of a generation reared on the good-

versus-evil wizardry of J. K. Rowling. Irecently taught a class of quite brilliantuniversity students, most of whom, whenasked to name their desert-island book,said Harry Potterand then good-na-turedly debated among themselves which

volume was best. (They noted, too, thatthey were the same age as Harry Potter,having begun middle school exactly whenhe began Hogwarts. I remarked that I

was the same age as Osama bin Ladenand received some startled looks.)

1

SPEEcHlESS

There was a period, about a year ago,when every few nights my wife andI would be awakened by the sound oflittle steps in the darkness. Then oursons quick breathing in our room, andfinally his trembling voice from the

light, and the array of beliefs, perhaps ac-complish what the more contentious reli-gious assertions in the neighborhoodthe cross, the mosquecould not. And

who would sue?Last week, Nakagaki, who is fifty and

lives in Brooklyn, dropped by the Ki-nokuniya Bookstore, in midtown, to buy

rice paper for the ceremony this Sunday.He wore navy-blue robes and sandals.His head was shaved, and he smiled a lot,especially when saying things that he felthe shouldnt be saying. He was accom-panied by his friend Matthew Weiner,an associate dean in the office of religiouslife at Princeton, who is writing a bookabout his own work as a communityorganizer with the Interfaith Center.T.K.s an in-your-face Buddhist, with asmile, Weiner said. A Buddhist trou-

blemaker. A provocateur with a noblepurpose.Buddhists tend not to push their

views, Nakagaki said. But this is a coun-try of talking, so I have to talk. Weinercited the Buddhist term upayaskillfulmeans.

After browsing the aisles for a while,Nakagaki chose three sheaves of ricepaper from a shelf. Glancing at the price,he told Weiner, with a big grin, that heexpected to be reimbursed.

Nick Paumgarten

A magical, Manichaean, neo-Biblicalview of the world may be less possible forthose belonging to an older generation,

whose desert-island book might be, forexample, Graham Greenes The Powerand the Glory, and so the death of binLaden was, in general, treated more so-berly by them. The new boss, as Pete

Townshend once suggested, may be thesame as the old boss. And one whiskeypriest can be replaced by another.

The idealism of younger generationscontinues in every part of the world. And

yet who would want to rid the young oftheir idealism? It leaves us without eventhe gruesomely cheering Harry Potterreaders. It would leave us with peopleeven more mysterious and unnerving.

Who may or may not optimistically showup for work the next day. Whose com-

mitment to the resumption of the every-day may be as shaky as terrorisms propo-nents would like it to be.

Ten years ago in these pages, writersgrappled eloquently with the bombing ofthe Twin Towers, meticulously describ-ing the billowing smoke, the blue sky, therecurrent dreams of flying low through acity. The word cowardly was semanti-cally parsed. Bravery was praised. Middle-of-the-night calls were confessed to, andan intelligent attempt was made to con-

textualize the event in a longer global his-tory of political tragedy and war con-ducted in urban streets. Yet what hastranspired in the ten years since 9/11, bothhere and in the Middle East, was not an-ticipated by any of these writers, all of

whom are paid for their finely tunedimaginations. J. K. Rowling, showing upat her desk in the aftermath, feeling a gen-erations bolt-of-lightning scar, and imag-ining a long battle laced with fantasy, mayhave outwritten everyone.

Lorrie Moore