A late summer day

Natural History, Nov, 2001 by Ellen Goldensohn

"Last autumn the wild geese flew day after day across the path of the shells."

--Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

The American Museum of Natural History, where our offices are situated, is a hundred or so blocks north of the World Trade Center. On the bright, clear morning of September 11, a few members of the magazine's staff, on their way here from downtown and from Brooklyn, witnessed an attack that came quite literally out of the blue to demolish thousands of individual lives.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Museum's Rose Center for Earth and Space and author of our monthly column "Universe," is a member of the magazine family who lives in lower Manhattan. He bore precise, but not dispassionate, witness to the events of September 11 in an e-mail message sent to family and friends the next morning. Here is part of that message:

   As more and more and more and more and more emergency vehicles descended
   ... I hear a second explosion in WTC 2, then a loud, low frequency rumble
   that precipitates the unthinkable--a collapse of all the floors above the
   point of explosion. First the top surface, containing the helipad, tips
   sideways in full view. Then the upper floors fall straight down in a
   demolition-style implosion, taking all lower floors with it, even those
   below the point of the explosion. A dense, thick dust cloud rises up in its
   place, which rapidly pours through the warren of streets that cross lower
   Manhattan. I close all our windows and blinds. As the dust cloud engulfs my
   building, an eerie darkness surrounded us--the kind of darkness you
   experience before a severe thunderstorm....

      I will never be the same after yesterday, in ways that I cannot
   foresee.... How naive I was to believe that the world is fundamentally
   different from that of our ancestors, whose lives were changed by bearing
   witness to the twentieth century's vilest acts of war.

Three weeks later, as the magazine goes to press, another spell of warm, bright weather temporarily envelops the city. From our balcony, we can see the occasional flock of birds moving south, and a security guard here told me that some of them are pausing to feed in the small park in front of the Planetarium. We are left to mourn, to carry on, to try to grasp what happened--and to look to the best of human science, anthropology, economics, history, literature, and philosophy to tell us why our species is capable of such things.