The white plume

"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center."

— National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, September 2001

"Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?"

— President George W. Bush, September 2002

The subtlest change in New York is something that people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

It used to be that the Statue of Liberty was the signpost that proclaimed New York and translated it for all the world. Today Liberty shares the role with Death. Along the East River, from the razed slaughterhouses of Turtle Bay, as though in a race with the spectral flight of planes, men are carving out the permanent headquarters of the United Nations — the greatest housing project of them all. In its stride, New York takes on one more interior city, to shelter, this time, all governments, and to clear the slum called war. …

This race — this race between the destroying planes and the struggling Parliament of Man — it sticks in all our heads. The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.

— E.B. White, from "Here Is New York," 1948

Many others, I realize, have pointed to this eerily prophetic essay during the past two years. I heard it read this weekend on NPR's "Selected Shorts" and went out and bought a copy of White's Essays.

White himself didn't think his essay aged very well: "The city I described has disappeared, and another city has emerged in its place — one that I'm not familiar with. But I remember the former one, with longing and with love."

The same could be said in 2003 by anyone who ever loved that city, even from afar. Particularly when one reads passages like this:

Manhattan has been compelled to expand skyward because of the absence of any other direction in which to grow. This, more than any other thing, is responsible for its physical majesty. It is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village — the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying that the way is up.