In an important, little appreciated, and utterly tragic principle regulating the structure of nearly all complex systems, building up must be accomplished step by tiny step, whereas destruction need occupy but an instant. In previous essays on the nature of change, I have called this phenomenon the Great Asymmetry (with uppercase letters to emphasize the sad generality). Ten thousand acts of kindness done by thousands of people, and slowly building trust and harmony over many years, can be undone by one destructive act of a skilled and committed psychopath. Thus, even if the effects of kindness and evil balance out in the course of history, the Great Asymmetry guarantees that the numbers of kind and evil people could hardly differ more, for thousands of good souls overwhelm each perpetrator of darkness.
I stress this greatly underappreciated point because our error in equating a balance of effects with equality in numbers could lead us to despair about human possibilities, especially at this moment of mourning and questioning; whereas, in reality, the decent multitudes, performing their ten thousand acts of kindness, vastly outnumber the very few depraved people in our midst. Thus, we have every reason to maintain our faith in human kindness, and our hopes for the triumph of human potential, if only we can learn to harness this wellspring of unstinting goodness in nearly all of us.
For this reason, a documentation of the innumerable small acts of kindness, the good deeds that almost always pass beneath our notice for lack of “news value,” becomes an imperative duty, a responsibility that might almost be called holy, when we must reaffirm the prevalence of human decency against our preeminent biases for hyping the cataclysmic and ignoring the quotidian. Ordinary kindness trumps paroxysmal evil by at least a million events to one, and we will not grasp this inspiring ratio unless we record the Everest of decency built grain by grain into a mighty fortress taller than any breakable building of mere concrete and steel.
Our media have stressed—as well they should—the spectacular acts of goodness and courage done by professionals pledged to face such dangers, and by ordinary people who can summon superhuman strength in moments of crisis: the brave firefighters who rushed in to get others out; the passengers of United Flight 93 who drew the grimly correct inference when they learned the fate of the Twin Towers, and died fighting rather than afraid, perhaps saving thousands of lives by accepting their own deaths in an unpopulated field. But each of these spectacular acts rests upon an immense substrate of tiny kindnesses that cannot be motivated by thoughts of fame or fortune (for no one expects their documentation), and can only represent the almost automatic shining of simple human goodness. But this time, we must document the substrate, if only to reaffirm the inspiring predominance of kindness at a crucial moment in this vale of tears.
Halifax sat on the invisible periphery of a New York epicenter, with 45 planes, mostly chock-full of poor strangers from strange lands, arrayed in two lines on the tarmac, and holding 9,000 passengers to house, feed, and, especially, to comfort. May it then be recorded, may it be inscribed forever in the Book of Life: Bless the good people of Halifax who did not sleep, who took strangers into their homes, who opened their hearts and shelters, who rushed in enough food and clothing to supply an army, who offered tours of their beautiful city, and, above all, who listened with a simple empathy that brought this tough and fully grown man to tears, over and over again. I heard not a single harsh word, saw not the slightest gesture of frustration, and felt nothing but pure and honest welcome.
I know that the people of Halifax have, by long tradition and practice, shown heroism and self-sacrifice at moments of disaster—occasional situations that all people of seafaring ancestry must face. I know that you received and buried the drowned victims of the Titanic in 1912, lost one in ten of your own people in the Halifax Explosion of 1917, and gathered in the remains of the recent Swissair disaster.
But, in a sense that may seem paradoxical at first, you outdid yourselves this time because you responded immediately, unanimously, unstintingly, and with all conceivable goodness, when no real danger, but merely fear and substantial inconvenience, dogged your refugees for a few days. Our lives did not depend upon you, but you gave us everything nonetheless. We, 9,000 strong, are forever in your debt, and all humanity glows in the light of your unselfish goodness.
And so my wife and I drove back home, past the Magnetic Hill of Moncton (now a theme park in this different age), past the reversing rapids of Saint John, visible from the highway, through the border crossing at Calais (yes, I know, as in Alice, not as in ballet), and down to a cloud of dust and smoke enveloping a mountain of rubble, once a building and now a tomb for 3,000 people. But you have given me hope that the ties of our common humanity will bind even these wounds. And so, Canada, although you are not my home or native land, we will always share this bond of your unstinting hospitality to people who descended upon you as frightened strangers from the skies, and received nothing but solace and solidarity in your embrace of goodness. So, Canada, because we beat as one heart, from Evangeline in Louisiana to the intrepid Mr. Sukanen of Moose Jaw, I will stand on guard for thee.
29
Apple Brown Betty17
THE PATTERNS OF HUMAN HISTORY MIX DECENCY AND depravity in equal measure. We often assume, therefore, that such a fine balance of results must emerge from societies made of decent and depraved people in equal numbers. But we need to expose and celebrate the fallacy of this conclusion so that, in this moment of crisis, we may reaffirm an essential truth too easily forgotten, and regain some crucial comfort too readily foregone. Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus, in what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by ten thousand acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible as the “ordinary” efforts of a vast majority.
Thus, we face an imperative duty, almost a holy responsibility, to record and honor the victorious weight of these innumerable little kindnesses, when an unprecedented act of evil so threatens to distort our perception of ordinary human behavior. I have stood at Ground Zero, stunned by the twisted ruins of the largest human structure ever destroyed in a catastrophic moment. (I will discount the claims of a few biblical literalists for the Tower of Babel.) And I have contemplated a single day of carnage that our nation has not suffered since battles that still evoke passions and tears, nearly 150 years later: Antietam, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor. The scene is insufferably sad, but not at all depressing. Rather, Ground Zero can only be described, in the lost meaning of a grand old word, as “sublime,” in the sense of awe inspired by solemnity.
But, in human terms, Ground Zero is the focal point for a vast web of bustling goodness, channeling uncountable deeds of kindness from an entire planet—the acts that must be recorded to reaffirm the overwhelming weight of human decency. The rubble of Ground Zero stands mute, while a beehive of human activity churns within, and radiates outward, as everyone makes a selfless contribution, big or tiny according to means and skills, but each of equal worth. My wife and stepdaughter established a depot to collect and ferry needed items in short supply, including respirators and shoe inserts, to the workers at Ground Zero. Word spreads like a fire of goodness, and people stream in, bringing gifts from a pocketful of batteries to a ten-thousand-dollar purchase of hard hats, made on the spot at a local supply house and delivered right to us.
I will cite but one tiny story, among so many, to begin the count that will overwhelm the power of any terrorist’s act. And by such tales, multiplied many millionfold, let these few depraved people finally understand why their vision of inspired fear cannot prevail over ordinary decency. As we left a local restaurant to make a delivery to Ground Zero late one evening, the cook gave us a shopping bag and said: “Here’s a dozen apple brown bettys, our best dessert, still warm. Please giv
e them to the rescue workers.” How lovely, I thought, but how meaningless, except as an act of solidarity, connecting the cook to the cleanup. Still, we promised that we would make the distribution, and we put the bag of twelve apple brown bettys atop several thousand respirators and shoe pads.
Twelve apple brown bettys into the breach. Twelve apple brown bettys for thousands of workers. And then I learned something important that I should never have forgotten—and the joke turned on me. Those twelve apple brown bettys went like literal hotcakes. These trivial symbols in my initial judgment turned into little drops of gold within a rainstorm of similar offerings for the stomach and soul, from children’s postcards to cheers by the roadside. We gave the last one to a firefighter, an older man in a young crowd, sitting alone in utter exhaustion as he inserted one of our shoe pads. And he said, with a twinkle and a smile restored to his face: “Thank you. This is the most lovely thing I’ve seen in four days—and still warm!”
30
The Woolworth Building18
THE ASTRONOMICAL MOTTO OF NEW YORK STATE–excelsior (literally “higher,” or, more figuratively, “ever upward”)—embodies both the dream and the danger of human achievement in its ambiguous message. In the promise of the dream, we strive to exceed our previous best as we reach upward, literally to the stars, and ethically to knowledge and the pursuit of happiness. In the warnings of danger, any narrowly focused and linear goal can drift, especially when our moral compass fails, into the zealotry of “true belief,” and thence to an outright fanaticism that brooks no opposition.
As a naturalist by profession, and a humanist at heart, I have long believed that wisdom dictates an optimal strategy for proper steering toward the dream and away from the danger: as you reach upward, always festoon the structure of your instrument (whether conceptual or technological) with the rich quirks and contradictions, the foibles and tiny gleamings, of human and natural diversity—for abstract zealotry can never defeat a great dream anchored in the concrete of human warmth and laughter.
For all my conscious life, I have held one object close to my heart as both the abstract symbol and the actual incarnation of this great duality: upward thrust tempered by frailty, diversity, and contradiction. Let me then confess my enduring love affair with a skyscraper: the Woolworth Building, the world’s tallest at 792 feet from its opening in 1913 until its overtopping by the Chrysler Building (another favorite) in 1929. This gorgeous pinnacle on Lower Broadway—set between the Tweed Courthouse to the east (a low artifact of human rapacity) and, until the tragedy of September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers to the west (a high artifact of excelsior in all senses)—represents the acme in seamless and utterly harmonious blending of these two components that must unite to achieve the dream, but that seem so inherently unmixable.
The Woolworth Building surely reaches high enough to embody the goals of excelsior. But its lavish embellishments only enhance the effect, giving warmth, breadth, and human scale to the height of transcendence. The outer cladding of glowing terra-cotta (not stone, as commonly stated) reflects the warmth of baked clay, not the colder gleam of metal. The overtly gothic styling of the lush exterior ornamentation marries an ecclesiastical ideal of past centuries with the verticality of modern life (thus engendering the building’s wonderfully contradictory moniker as “cathedral of commerce”). The glorious interior, with a million tiny jewels in a mosaic ceiling, its grand staircase, murals of labor and commerce, and elegantly decorated elevators, inspires jumbled and contradictory feelings of religious awe, technological marvel, and aesthetic beauty, sometimes sublime and sometimes bumptious. Meanwhile, and throughout, high grandeur merges with low comedy, as the glistening ceiling rests upon gargoyles of Mr. Woolworth counting the nickels and dimes that built his empire, and the architect Cass Gilbert cradling in his arms the building that his image now helps to support.
When I was young, the Woolworth Building rose above all its neighbors, casting a warm terra-cotta gleam over lower Manhattan. But I have not seen this optimally tempered glory since the early 1970s because the Twin Towers, rising in utter metallic verticality just to the southwest, either enveloped my love in shadow, or consigned its warmer glow to invisibility within a metallic glare.
There can be no possible bright side to the tragedy of September 11 and the biggest tomb of American lives on any single day since the Battle of Gettysburg nearly 150 years ago. But the fact of human endurance and human goodness stands taller than 100 Twin Towers stacked one atop the other. These facts need symbols for support, so that the dream of excelsior will not be extinguished in the perverse utilization of its downside by a few evil men.
I returned to my beloved natal city, following an involuntary week in Halifax (as one of 9,000 passengers in 45 diverted airplanes on September 11), on a glorious day of cloudless sky. That afternoon, my family and I went to Ground Zero to deliver supplies to rescue workers. There, I experienced the visceral shock (despite full intellectual foreknowledge and conscious anticipation) of any loyal New Yorker: my skyline has fractured; they are not there! But then I looked eastward from the shores of the Hudson River and saw the world’s most beautiful urban vista, restored for the worst possible reason, but resplendent nonetheless: the Woolworth Building, with its gracious setbacks, its gothic filigrees, and its terra-cotta shine, standing bright, tall, and alone again, against the pure blue sky. We cannot be beaten if the spirit holds, and if we celebrate the continuity of a diverse, richly textured, ethically anchored past with the excelsior of a properly tempered reaching toward the stars.
When Marcel Duchamp moved from Paris to New York as a young and cynical artist, he also dropped his intellectual guard and felt the allure of the world’s tallest building, then so new. And he decided to designate this largest structure as an artwork by proclamation: “find inscription for Woolworth Bldg. as readymade” he wrote to himself in January 1916.
The Reverend S. Parkes Cadman, dedicating the Woolworth Building as a “cathedral of commerce” at its official opening on April 23, 1913 (when President Wilson flipped a switch in Washington and illuminated the structure with 80,000 lightbulbs), paraphrased the last line of Wordsworth’s famous ode on the “Intimations of Immortality” in stating that this great edifice evoked “feelings too deep even for tears.” But I found the words that Duchamp sought as I looked up at this human beauty restored against a sky blue background on that bright afternoon of September 18. They belong to the poem’s first stanza, and they describe the architectural love of my life, standing so tall against all evil, and for all the grandeur and all the foibles of human reality and transcendence—“Apparelled in celestial light,/ the glory and the freshness of a dream.”
31
September 11, ’0119
“TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON, AND A TIME TO every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born and a time to die: a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1–2).
I have a large collection of antiquarian books in science, some with beautiful bindings and plates, others dating to the earliest days of printing in the late fifteenth century. But my most precious possession, the pearl beyond all price in my collection, cost five cents when Joseph Arthur Rosenberg, a thirteen-year-old immigrant just off the boat from Hungary, bought the small volume on October 25, 1901. This book, Studies in English Grammar, written by J. M. Greenwood and published in 1892, carries a little stamp identifying the place of purchase: Carroll’s book store. Old, rare and curious books. Fulton and Pearl Sts. Brooklyn.
The arrival of Joseph Arthur Rosenberg, my maternal grandfather Papa Joe, began the history of my family in America. He came with his mother, Leni, and two sisters (my aunts Regina and Gus) in steerage aboard the SS Kensington, sailing from Antwerp on August 31 with 60 passengers in first class and 1,000 in steerage. The passenger manifest states that Leni arrived with $6.50 to start her new life in America. Papa Joe added one other bit of information to the date of purchase and his name, inscribed on the tit
le page. He wrote, with maximal brevity in the most eloquent of all possible words: “I have landed. Sept. 11th 1901.”
I wanted to visit Ellis Island on September 11, 2001, to stand with my mother, his only surviving child, at his site of entry on my family’s centennial. My flight from Milan, scheduled to arrive in New York City at midday, landed in Halifax instead—as the great vista of old and new, the Statue of Liberty and adjacent Ellis Island, with the Twin Towers hovering above, became a tomb for 3,000 people, sacrificed to human evil on the one hundredth anniversary of one little lineage’s birth in America. A time to be born and, exactly a century later, a time to die.
Papa Joe lived an ordinary life as a garment worker in New York City. He enjoyed periods of security and endured bouts of poverty; he and my grandmother raised four children, all imbued with the ordinary values that ennoble our species and nation: fairness, kindness, the need to persevere and rise by one’s own efforts. In the standard pattern, his generation struggled to solvency; my parents graduated from high school, fought a war, and moved into the middle classes; the third cohort achieved a university education, and some of us have enjoyed professional success.