9/11 and "Babylon"

Over the weekend, my Pre-AP English 2 students were assigned to read Stephen Vincent Benet's "By the Waters of Babylon." Just in case you aren't familiar with the story...it is a story of a young boy growing up in a post-apocalyptic civilization that is quite primitive from the way we live now, and he takes a journey to a sacred city--now demolished--that is believed to have belonged to the gods. At the end of the story, we find out the sacred city is New York.

The story was written in 1937, before nuclear threats, before terrorists took over planes and crashed them into skyscrapers. But in this passage, the young boy has a vision of what happened to the city of gods:

I have seen men die. But this was not like that. When gods war with gods, they use weapons we do not know. It was fire falling out of the sky and a mist that poisoned. It was the time of the Great Burning and the Destruction. They ran about like ants in the streets of their city--poor gods, poor gods! Then the towers began to fall. A few escaped--yes, a few. . . . I saw it happen, I saw the last of them die. It was darkness over the broken city and I wept.

Wow...the power of words.

Fortunately, the story ends with a message of hope: "We must build again." I'm not really sure what I was expecting on this fifth anniversary of 9/11. I've seen the video coverage of the appropriately reverent memorial services conducted in various parts of the country, and my school--probably like many schools--observed a moment of silence. But in many ways today, life went on as usual, and perhaps that is the most appropriate 9/11 tribute of all.