A leap of faith

Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, where many heroes of Ireland's "terrible beauty"--the Easter Rising of 1916--rest. (Wiki Commons photo)

The single thing I've pondered more than any other about 9/11 is the people jumping from the roof or upper floors. Some held hands to start with. Some just went, floating down like heavenly butterflies, but faster. Becoming infinitesimal parts of their former selves when they landed.

I cannot imagine viewing it in person. It was frightful enough on television. It was, though, a frightful beauty, to borrow a concept from William Butler Yeats, who referred to the bloody Irish Rising as a "terrible beauty."

The frightful perfection of those falling humans brought to mind everything I have ever pondered in a single act. Everything I have ever pondered is what all of us ponder, beneath it all; life and death. How does one lead into the other, and when? And how? And why? We may obsess about our jobs, our families, our health, world politics, a pain in our big toe. But when all is said and done, what we are really contemplating is the continuum of life and death and when and how we will end up on the other side of that bell curve. And will it hurt?

The people who floated into eternity off the World Trade Center flew that bell curve from the upward slope to the downward, to the place where the line describing a life falls off the other end of the chart. I wonder if they knew, as they went, that they had reached the apex and were toppling over into the final curve. I wonder if they knew before they stepped into space. Of course they did. Of course.

Or does human hope transcend even the certain knowledge that a human being falling 110 floors through space and time into a concrete expression of the end of the graph cannot survive?

What knowledge those sainted people had convinced them that taking charge of their drop off the life-death continuum should be taken into their own hands, and not left to the vagaries of what might happen. Whether a helicopter might reach the roof before the buildings collapsed and save them? Did they know, intuitively or possibly from the sounds of explosions, that the buildings would collapse, and that nothing could survive--although miraculously, some people did? How could they have been sure of collapse, so sure that they took the first step of their descent into death, knowing full well they could not change their mind? They could no longer hope? How did they know?

How did they do it? I ask the question over and over. One doesn't go to work in office towers the same way Donegal fishermen went to work for centuries. Donegal fishermen purposely never learned to swim because doing so would just prolong the agonies of the North Atlantic if their ship went down. They also wore knitted woollen sweaters that would reveal, long after the fishes and tides had had their way with the insubstantial human flesh, what family or town the body was from, as a way of ensuring all recovered bodies were buried properly where they should lie.

There was nothing like that, not from start to finish, for the office workers whose lives ended at some nanosecond after they escaped a fiery death to choose a death of unknown parameters. As I understand it, there was nothing to bury.

Perhaps that was the ultimate statement, the ultimate revelation of where all of this--ALL OF THIS--ends up, no matter what. It ends up in neutrons, electrons--particulate pieces of particles--at some point. Bones long buried and excavated would appear to have given up the ghost but not, entirely, the substance. Eventually, though, even the particles of the bones must sunder; millions of bones have. It is the rare human whose long-buried bones turn up for wonder and study. Most are nothingness, a slow process except if one steps off the 110th floor of the world's tallest building.

Those who stepped into space, history, eternity, heaven or hell are also heroes of 9/11. They revealed to those who would look how evanescent the existence of all earth--all people, things, named places, ideas, all of it--is. They ensured that none of us could look life, or death, in the face again without feeling, all at once, that nothing is worth it, but everything is worth it. We must press on, we must carry out our work on all fronts, but we must be ever mindful that we may not have a choice about how it ends.

The skywalkers had a choice, but not much of one. Still, it was the complete one. A decision about when life ends, with incomplete information to base it on. They could not KNOW they would not be saved. They had to abandon hope, willfully, that they would be rescued.

What they decided, in each singular and particular case, was indeed--one can say no more--a frightful beauty, an elegance and economy of spirit almost unmatched in history.

I applaud and grieve for them.