I had just about made my peace with the 9/11 memorial, whose concept I had at first found generic and full of clichés: the trees, the pool of falling water, the glimpse into the void and so on. Despite a few false notes (the tacky little flags on the bagpipes, and George W. Bush reciting from a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to a mother who lost five sons in the Civil War, once again opportunistically figuring the deaths of unknowing civilians as military heroism), the opening ceremony on Sunday, 11 September had gone well. More important, none of the bereaved families had to my knowledge expressed any negative feelings about the memorial, which lists the names of all the dead and solves the debate about how the names should be grouped by a principle of ‘meaningful adjacency’. As best he could, Michael Arad listed the names near or next to those with whom they had some sort of living affiliation.

LRB 17 November 2011 | PDF Download