After Great Pain

After terrible and constantly televised events like those at Virginia Tech, one's response--or at least my response--is to clam up. A subsequent response is to comment, and yet any comment that comes to mind is most notable for its inadequacy.

Although numerous obvious differences exist between what occurred on the infamous September 11 and what occurred at Virginia Tech, I found myself thinking similar things about both occurrences. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say I have found myself feeling similar emotions.

Consequently, I reviewed a brief speech I was asked to give (I did not volunteer to give it) at a college-event held not long after "September 11." Because it includes references to poetry, I thought I'd post it on this blog.

Here it is:

Between Tuesday morning [September 11, 2001] and today, there have been moments when I've wanted to talk about what happened and moments when only silence seemed appropriate. Like you, I've experienced shock and a tumult of emotions. At a University, we are accustomed to putting our minds to things. This is a place of thinking. But extreme violence can paralyze thought and shake our confidence in the worth of our daily teaching and learning. Emily Dickinson wrote, "After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The nerves sit ceremonious like Tombs-the stiff heart questions." [from Dickinson's poem #341]


In recent days, I have also felt appreciation for family and friends, for colleagues and students, for life itself. My heart has gone out to strangers pictured on television. Good people and the good in people are more dear and seem more fragile to me than before.


As much as we may wish otherwise, the events of Tuesday will change our world forever in ways we cannot know or control. Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the United Nations forty years ago, grappled in his time with such uncertainty and died in an airplane crash while on a mission of peace. He once observed that "acts of violence, whether on a small or large scale, contain a bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death-and the meaninglessness of killing." [from Markings.] For us all, I wish for wisdom as we struggle with our responses to the killings, and as we strive to create meaning out of the deaths.


(from September 14, 2001)