On Friday morning the street was blocked off and children were playing tag on it. The street wraps around a hundred-year-old church and separates its grounds from the surrounding university campus. For the United States a century qualifies a church as old, and though the dome and bell tower imitate the style of a specific time and place they do suggest a certain timelessness. I sat in the university library across the street. In the strong sunlight of the longest day of the year, under a sky cleared by the night’s storm of its usual haze, the strip of grass between the library and the street looked unnaturally, shockingly green. I remembered that it was new. The old lawn was peeled away after student protestors put up tents on it to protest the war in Gaza.

Someone of a certain age said that he was adjusting to the idea of living the rest of his life under an authoritarian government hostile to most of what he holds dear, attached as he is to democracy and the way things used to be. Hearing this blew the lid off a deep well of internal sadness I didn’t even know existed. I was embarrassed by my sadness, because it has been unfashionable to admit to feeling anything about Donald Trump. Also the way things used to be wasn’t especially democratic or just—the students knew that—and who knows how things will be, anyway.

Still I think it matters what kind of government my country has, and I would rather a stated commitment to democracy imperfectly carried out to the absence thereof. (I have in mind a narrow definition of democracy: a system in which “people are free to choose, including to remove, governments.”) I think there is something special about the United States’ founding principles, but not so special that they can save us. Or more to the point, I don’t think that our uniqueness can save us when we’ve chosen to turn our backs on it. A nation of laws not men could maybe outlast one or a few lawless men. We’ve chosen to be something else instead now.

The church, the library. How many churches have seen weeds grow up through stones that men once kissed with lips kept pure for this purpose alone? How many libraries has the world lost since Alexandria burned? A nearby town can only scrape together enough money to keep its library open a few days a week. The children playing in the street were never going to grow up in the country I thought I knew. It passed out of being with my own childhood.

A few days after police officers behind riot shields squared off against the students in their soft-sided tents, a lawn-service truck pulled up and a crew of workers unrolled the new lawn. No tent stakes had ever been hammered into this grass but it was still marked by what had come before. The men who unloaded the big rounds of sod looked like the people being grabbed off American streets by armed men hiding their faces.

Where will everything we know and love endure? In this library, bound and filed away for an unknown future? Across the street, in the church, monastery walls again rising against barbarism outside?

Everything can’t be this freighted with meaning. It’s too much to see in the very blades of grass a menacing reminder of what has happened, is happening, could happen. The lawn is a bunch of plants, the church a collection of stone and glass and color. The library holds the work of countless human lives bound between covers. The books sit on the shelves. We seek for knowledge in our computers now.

“Yesterday Father Cellarer lent me the jeep. I did not ask for it, he just lent it to me out of the goodness of his heart, so that I would be able to go out to the woods on the other side of the knobs. I had never driven a car before.  … I drove the jeep madly into the forest in a rosy fog of confusion and delight. We romped over trestles and I sang ‘O Mary I love you,’ went splashing through puddles a foot deep, rushed madly into the underbrush and backed out again.

Finally I got the thing back to the monastery covered with mud from stem to stern. I stood in choir at Vespers, dizzy with the thought: ‘I have been driving a jeep.’

Father Cellarer just made me a sign that I must never, never, under any circumstances, take the jeep out again.”

Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

It is a curious fact that W.H. Auden is most famous for a poem he came to loathe. The last time he gave permission for September 1, 1939 to be printed, in 1964, he noted, “Mr. W.H. Auden considers [this poem] to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.” Auden wrote it just after Nazi Germany invaded Poland and the war Europe desperately hoped to avoid became unavoidable. Explaining his disavowal of it later, he said, “The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty—and must be scrapped.”

September 1, 1939 enjoyed a renaissance in the United States after September 11, 2001. Every line seemed to reverberate with tragic prescience; it was eminently quotable. “Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return” was, for some, an explanation too neat to be resisted, a pithy line that cut through the swirl of fear and sorrow and jingoism. That the rest of the poem undercuts the certainty of those two lines with an overwhelming sense of ambivalence—evil may be “bred in the bone,” a later stanza suggests—was beside the point. That Auden disowned his poem shortly after its publication was also beside the point. It was solace to a frightened and confused people who saw themselves “lost in a haunted wood/children afraid of the dark/who have never been happy or good.”

In a way, September 1, 1939 is the right poem for September 11th precisely because of its post-publication history. Auden wrote it in the wake of a traumatic event and later, when time and reflection had worked on the immediate visceral reaction, he tried to backpedal. We said and did things in the wake of September 11th, our own traumatic event, that with the benefit of hindsight and perspective we might wish to undo. Mistakes were made, as the saying went. A wounded country reacted sharply, out of fear, and buried doubt with certainty.

In related milestone news, August 2011 was the first month since the war began without an American casualty in Iraq.

September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

…

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

…

(Excerpt from here.)

• 10 minutes of free parking
• A glance around your living room for the cigarettes I know you still smoke
• 2 sets plastic cutlery; patch of roped-off grass
• A concord grape that may not have been for sampling
• Blacked-out windows of a black Suburban for lipstick application
• A look long enough to provoke a “Can I help you?” from a Matthew McConaghey lookalike on Lexington Avenue, who upon boarding a crosstown bus was revealed not to be Matthew McConaghey

Every time I walk through Astoria Park I’m struck by the diversity of activities and people pursuing them. There are dads in t-shirts with the sleeves cut off huffing and puffing and doing that dad-getting-back-in-shape type of jogging where the motion is largely up and down rather than forward. Dad is usually being outstripped by his three-year-old on a tricycle.

A young blond mom in yoga pants powerwalks with aggressive swinging of the hips, accompanied by her small daughter on a scooter in a Barbie helmet who is in the middle of saying “See when you scream at me I just get angry” and the mom is responding “See I scream at you because” and I really want to hear the end of that exchange but they are powerwalking and scootering too fast.

A group of kids are monopolizing the water fountain, filling balloon after balloon with water as a line of sweaty adults hold back their desire for a slurp of water and/or inability to see someone cut a line without barking “hey! you see this line?” because the kids are cute in their excitement about the water balloon project. The project turns out not to be a water balloon fight; they are using the balloons as vessels, filling them, carefully carrying them to a nearby bench, and emptying them into a plastic container, its purpose endlessly absorbing to these girls and completely inaccessible to the waiting adults. Eventually a smiling South Asian man rides by on a bike, assesses the situation, doubles back and asks the girls to let others have a turn.

Hot young things who walk in pairs, their leggings and skintight tops showing off hourglass shapes that would make Kim Kardashian jealous, their ponytails sleek, and their conversations along the lines of “but then Tyler came to her party, and he showed up totally drunk, and” but again we’ve walked past and we’ll never know if Tyler is a boyfriend, cousin, or what, and if his behavior is a serious continuing issue, or not that big of a deal.

50s-ish women with visors and fanny packs walk-and-talk, discussing the rise and fall of neighborhoods. 70s-ish men sit on the benches at the brow of the park, faces to the setting sun.

Inside the track, people do calisthenics and crunches. Some of them work in pairs. You can always borrow someone else’s partner’s encouragement if you need help getting to that 10th sit-up. “Ya feeling this, right? Ya always feel the sit-ups. How ya know they’re good for you.”

Inside the track, on the field, the “No Ball Games” sign is being disregarded with joyous abandon. There are at least five soccer games going on. To my delight I recognize a group of older men playing SPUD and I’m immediately transported to the field behind my grandmother’s house, my cousins and I spelling out giant steps, S-P-U-D SPUD, stretching one leg out until our shorts threatened to rip, pegging each other as hard as we could.

Mainly it’s soccer though, and there’s always some guys in striped cook’s pants, and some guys in undershirts, gym shorts and dark dress socks, their belt, suit jacket and pants folded neatly on the edge of the field. The ball games add a hazard to jogging around the track, because at any moment you could take a ball to the face, or to the stomach, or worse, to the behind, and then all the kids shriek with laughter and you hear “She got hit in the butt!” in four different languages.

But the hazard is worth it because the players kick the balls high high high, since they don’t have much lateral space to work with, and they arc beautifully, moving more slowly than would seem possible, and the evening light is so soft and clear that you can see the pattern of stitches turning over and over as the ball traces an elegant curve against the angles of the Triborough Bridge, gathers speed on the way down, and thwomps a helpless jogger. “Sorry, sorry!” all the players call out, and you can tell they are, but they can’t stop playing because they are having so much fun, this is so wonderful, the fresh air blowing off the river, the aforementioned evening light, the day ending with some light competition and vigorous moving about and camaraderie.

People of all shapes, sizes, races, income levels, are out of doors and breaking a sweat together. I have profound thoughts about America and melting pots, about neighborhoods, about community, about diversity, about fitness and fresh air, to the point that I think I should start taking a tape recorder with me to the park to preserve these observations, because they never sound as profound by the time I get home and write them down.

I feel a surge of affection for Astoria and for New York as I trot around the track, watching. This leads me to another profound thought, this one about New York’s boundless capacity for new life, new stories, its endless ability to absorb and embrace and make you its own.