California English
February 2002
Stephen K. Tollefson
I appreciate very much the efforts of teachers, from k-12 through graduate school, to address the terrorist attacks of September 11 in their classrooms. But much of it makes me nervous, I suppose in large part because I'm of Norwegian extraction and therefore, like all good Garrison Keillor characters, I tend to shy away from "feelings." In fact, my personal prejudice is that students write too much about how they feel and therefore don't learn to analyze. As the science writer Timothy Ferris said recently on our campus, people don't want to read about your feelings. You write to evoke feelings in your reader. That said, I'm about to launch here into a discussion of a "feelings" assignment that satisfies even an old lutefisk*-eater like me.
My first College Writing class at UC Berkeley after September 11th was Wednesday morning, the 12th. I had plans, but turned the class over to the students to do what they wanted. We spent most of the two hours discussing the events, and then I realized that the essay assignment I had planned for that week was now totally wrong. So that afternoon, I sent them the following email:
Thanks for a good class today. You all make teaching easier because you're so willing (ok, a little too willing sometimes) to exchange opinions and ideas. Here's a refined version of what we agreed on.
Your assignment is to write an "essay" in which you put down in writing your response yesterday to the events as they unfolded. That sounds simple, but you know me. I'm determined to make it more complicated, so note all the points below.
The idea that you should keep in your mind is from the very first piece you read, the opening of "Demian" by Hermann Hesse. Remember this line:
But every man is more than just himself; he represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.
What you're going to be doing in the next two days is recording that intersection.
1. This is not to be a simple chronology: e.g., got up at 8, heard the news, was afraid. At noon, I was mad, and talked to some friends.
Rather, this is to be a piece that puts down in writing an individual set of feelings to an event that is hard to comprehend.
2. Think of your audience. As we discussed, this is something that you will want to keep and will want to read in 20 or 30 years, and have your children and grandchildren read. So your audience is ANYONE, anyone who wants to understand what it was like to be you, on Sept 11, 2001 in Berkeley.
It's the kind of piece that we've all read, often in wonderful and well-known books about great (sometimes good and sometimes terrible) events in history.
3. It needs order and organization. They are not added touches; they create meaning, too. For instance, I can easily see someone starting in the evening first, then backtracking to the beginning of the day. Remember the more complicated organization of a simple piece like "The End of the World."**
4. It will have a thesis, so think about that. At it's most simple, the thesis will be implied. It will be essentially, that the reader can truly understand how you felt, because you've conveyed the feelings well. But it might be a more direct thesis. That one particular emotion or moment was the most significant of the day for you.
5. Think of all the ways we talked about to begin an essay--if you can't remember them, review Grammar Grams (of course). Think of how strong a sentence can be if it starts with "And" to make a rhetorical point. Of how sometimes a short sentence, suddenly in the middle of some long ones, can cause an effect. Make every word count; make them full of meaning.
6. Ok, I'll stop. You get the idea.
If you have questions, of course, please let me know. Will you bring two copies, so we can pass them around the room and get comments? Also, please remember to bring your "People Who Get Rubbished"*** papers.
The topic generated a number of pretty good papers. Many, however, were most notable for a single wonderful line or paragraph that encapsulated many of the students' feelings, which I distributed to the class under the heading,
Here are just a few of your wonderful lines from your papers.
- What has one person done to another to bring this on? Is it because on a day-to-day basis we treat each other with coldness? Is it because we are capable of racism and stereotypical narrow-mindedness? Whatever it is, it is human nature. It is our capacity for hatred. It is our capacity for cruelty and coldness. It is our capacity for genocide.
- As I walked to school, I felt nothing.
- (the last line of a paper) I began to cry and then slowly, without even noticing, I fell asleep.
- (opening of a paper) Will I live to see tomorrow? This question has been haunting me ever since I witnessed the most powerful nation in the world under attack.
- On the planes, I'm sure there were students, teachers, grandmas, fathers, priests, and family dogs: important individuals that people interact with, learn from, cry to, make proud, ask advice from, and build memories with.
And then there was one paper in particular, by Alexander Craig, that caught my attention. That paper is the secret, real reason I've written this article at all; it's a paper I think other people should read, so here it is:
My Memory of 9/11/01
I had not had much sleep because the night before was one of those nights where I planned to study and go to sleep early but ended up wasting my time till the late hours. It was for that reason that when the phone rang early the next morning I had no desire to leave the comfort of my bed and answer the phone. And even though my mind was still in the stairwell between consciousness and unconscious, I had the capacity to quickly decide that the answering machine should answer the call. The phone continued to ring and after the fourth ring the answering machine finally picked up. It was my friend Amanda who left a short and simple message saying that she wanted to know if my grandparents were ok because of everything that was happening in New York.
After listening to her message complete, I lay in my bed, wrapped in my soft warm covers, still floating in a half-conscious daze, but I began to wonder what she could have been talking about. What could have been happening in New York that she expected me to already know and what could be so serious that she would call and see how my if my grandparents were ok? My grandparents do not even live in New York.
As the questions in my mind began to build past their limit of tolerance, I decided to go to my computer to investigate. I cannot say that this was a conscious decision because I think that I do not make any conscious decisions in the morning. I simply run on some sort of deep embedded inter-program.
I sat at my desk and waited for the computer to start and then quickly went to CNN.com, which is, sadly, my main source for news. The page slowly opened and when all of the information on the page finally appeared what flashed before my eyes changed my day, if not my life, and in an instant I grew old.
How I first learned of the world trade center bombing is not the most interesting story and perhaps it is nothing even worth telling my grandchildren someday but it is something that I never want to forget. More precisely, what I do not want to forget—and likely cannot forget—about that morning is what was going through my mind when I first saw the picture of the destroyed World Trade Center buildings against a smoky and hazy New York skyline. I am not a good enough writer to be able to describe, in great detail, what was going through my mind at that moment and perhaps no one is capable of describing such feelings. I did not know if I had lost my ability to separate fiction from nonfiction because the events that had occurred were beyond my ability of viewing as believable and what was I to think or believe when my only glimpse of reality was a small image displayed across my computer monitor? In the end, that day became a day where nonfiction seized new territory and the event not only had to be believed but also had to be accepted.
I ran to a television and where I sat glued watching and listening to the continuous loop of limited information. As the day went on, my feelings eventually came to an equilibrium pushed with deep and constant denial, with small gaps of acceptance. For this equilibrium to remain in my mind I had to believe that the event was separated from me and that it was not going to affect my life. As the news rolled on and I watched as the world appeared to stop, my denial was shattered along with whatever was left of my fictional separation. That day was a day that I cannot forget no matter how hard I try.
But what I have forgotten is who I was before that day and innocence I then possessed. Now that I have accepted that such a horrible event can and has occurred, the history of my life in marked by a new wall, and I have live on both sides of it. For that reason I have grown old.
There is really not much to say, is there? Except maybe that the best paper about our own feelings does evoke feelings in the reader.
California English, February 2002
* Lutefisk: dried salt cod that is reconstituted by boiling it in lye or something for hours in Lutheran church basements throughout the mid-west, creating a smell that make you think that Norwegians really have no taste buds at all. There is some suspicion that in fact lutefisk is not actually eaten in the Old Country, but is a practical joke played on those of us who want to connect to our roots.
** "The End of the World" is a piece by Peter Fleming (from My Aunt's Rhinoceros, 1956) speculating on what the British would do if they knew the world was about to end. We had read it the week before to talk about methods of organization.
*** We had also coincidentally just read an article by Berkeley anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes in which she contends that genocide begins with the small mistreatments we inflict on others, and with the way we can so easily label people as "other" and therefore less than ourselves. ("People who get rubbished," The New Internationalist, No. 295, October 1997). So we had read several pieces that fed directly into this topic.