The towers fell on a Tuesday, which is the sort of day that usually reserves its dramas for committee meetings and the slow death of office plants. Twenty-five years on, one is still obliged to notice that the sky was the colour of a particularly smug postcard, the sort that arrives from a friend who has forgotten you exist until the photograph proves otherwise. Then the first aircraft arrived, and the postcard tore itself in half.
I was not there, of course, most of us were not, I was at home from University. Distance is the modern condition, and television made sure of it. We watched the second impact live, which is a phrase that still sits in the mouth like a bad olive. Live. As if death had decided to keep office hours. The commentary teams, those professional noticers of the obvious, fell briefly silent, which is the nearest television ever comes to dignity. Then they recovered, as they always do, and began the long process of turning horror into narrative, narrative into analysis, and analysis into the sort of solemn waffle that eventually requires a theme tune.
What remains, a quarter-century later, is not so much the image of the buildings collapsing—though that has been burnt into the collective retina with the efficiency of a branding iron—as the sudden discovery that the ordinary was not protected by its ordinariness. People went to work. They carried coffee. They argued about nothing in particular in elevators that would shortly cease to exist. The banality was the point. Evil, when it bothers to show up, rarely bothers with originality. It prefers the familiar street, the familiar skyline, the familiar assumption that today will resemble yesterday closely enough to allow for lunch plans.
The aftermath was a masterclass in competitive solemnity. Flags proliferated with the enthusiasm of a rash. Politicians discovered their inner Churchill, or at any rate their inner Churchill impersonator, and the language of resolution thickened like gravy left too long on the stove. We were assured that the world had changed forever, which is the sort of claim that looks impressive until one notices that the same people making it continued to book tables at the same restaurants and complain about the same traffic. Forever is a long time, and most of us are not built for it. We are built for the next news cycle, the next scandal, the next opportunity to feel briefly important by association with catastrophe.
There was, inevitably, the war. Or rather the wars, plural, which multiplied with the generosity of a bad idea that has found funding. One could argue about the wisdom of any particular response, and many did, at great and largely pointless length. What was harder to argue with was the spectacle of a civilisation that had spent decades congratulating itself on its subtlety suddenly discovering that subtlety is of limited use when the other party has decided that aeroplanes make excellent missiles. The satire wrote itself, which is always a bad sign. When reality starts producing its own punchlines, the professional satirist is left looking for alternative employment, preferably something involving less irony and more gardening.
Memory, meanwhile, has done what memory always does: it has edited. The sharp edges have been smoothed by repetition until the event resembles a particularly grim public holiday, complete with obligatory moments of silence and the soft focus of retrospect. Young people who were not alive at the time now study it as history, which means they study it with the same mixture of duty and mild boredom that earlier generations brought to the Treaty of Versailles. The photographs remain, of course—those terrible, beautiful photographs in which the light is perfect and the smoke is photogenic and the falling bodies are reduced to abstract marks against the blue. Art has always known how to make suffering look interesting. That is one of its less attractive talents.
And yet the lament persists, dry as it may sound. One does not need to inflate the occasion with purple prose to notice that something was taken that day which has not been returned. Not innocence—innocence is a commodity that was already in short supply—but a certain unexamined confidence that the skyline was permanent, that the morning commute was a private affair between a person and their destination, that the ordinary day could be trusted to remain ordinary. That confidence has been replaced by a low-grade vigilance, the sort that checks the exits in restaurants without quite admitting it is doing so. It is not heroic. It is merely accurate.
Twenty-five years is long enough for the politicians who spoke of resolve to have been replaced by other politicians who speak of other resolves. It is long enough for the children who watched the towers fall on classroom televisions to have children of their own, who will one day be shown the same footage and asked to feel something appropriate. Feeling appropriate is a skill that can be taught, rather like table manners. Whether it is the same as understanding is another question, and one that the anniversary industry is not notably eager to answer. The dead remain dead. That is the one fact that has resisted all attempts at narrative improvement. Their names are read aloud each year with the careful neutrality of a railway timetable, and then the living go back to their living. There is no satisfactory conclusion available, which is perhaps why the occasion continues to attract the attentions of those of us who make a living from unsatisfactory conclusions.
The towers are gone. The sky is still the same colour on a clear September morning. The difference is that we now look at it with a certain suspicion, as if it might be planning something. That suspicion is the real memorial, and it requires no plaque. It is carried, uncomfortably, in the ordinary act of looking up.