From the WSJ Opinion Archives
AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
The Enlightenment
New York's "Tribute in Light" reminds us why the world looks up to America.
NEW YORK--From my window, looking south toward lower Manhattan, I can see the twin columns of light that now shimmer against the night sky, ghostly but beautiful. People all over New York can see them. And the word they bring to my mind is true. This "Tribute in Light" feels right, feels true, like a rich note hit with perfect pitch, like "America the Beautiful" sung by Jessye Norman at the ceremony Monday evening, when for the first time these huge lights were switched on.
Given some of the weirder Sept. 11 commemorative designs making the rounds in recent months, there'd been room to worry about how this tribute might look. Frankly, after seeing the mawkish "child of light" theme overdone twice on ice at the Olympics in Salt Lake City, I'd wondered if battered New York needed anything involving further stress on luminosity.
It needed this.
Marking the first six months since Sept. 11, this temporary tribute soars high above the realms of manufactured sentiment or gratuitous lantern-work. The product of the combined creative efforts of several architects and light designer Paul Marantz, the display involves 88 xenon spotlights, each weighing 450 pounds and putting out 7,000 watts, all mounted in two huge clusters of 44 lamps apiece, aimed at the heavens to produce two beams of light reaching a mile into the sky. This week through April 13, these lights will be switched on every evening at dusk, and switched off at 11 p.m.
It is perfect--simple, eloquent and powerfully evocative of this nation's will, not only today but over many generations past, to beat back the darkness. The spotlights are set on the northwest edge of the huge site where the twin towers stood. Nothing is spelled out beyond the sight of these lights reaching toward the sky. You can see them as markers of remembrance, as flares of defiance, as signs of grace, as beacons of our country and civilization. To me, they seem to emanate from the watch fires of the human soul.
In the light that lingers just after sunset, they are barely visible. As it gets darker, they shine more clearly. Rising incandescent from the financial center of the world, they seem to me--more than any memorial in stone, or even steel--to belong to our modern age, to the era of technology and imagination and markets that brought together in this country have let us lead the world toward a wealth of wonders.
Seeing these lights from a distance on Monday evening, it felt somehow important to go to the source. I took the E train, which stops at a recently reopened subway station still labeled WTC, on the edge of Ground Zero. At 10:30 that night, there were still hundreds of people who had come to file past the site and to remember. New York being a city indomitably open for business around the clock, there were street vendors selling what have become the usual souvenirs: Police and Fire Department caps, pictures, rhinestone renditions of the American flag.
But what people had most clearly come for were the lights. For the first time since before the attack, you could see on every side a stance familiar from the days when people came to marvel at the World Trade Center. Heads tipped back, they were gazing up in awe.
In that gesture, you could see how fitting a tribute this is, both ephemeral and at the same time in touch with the eternal. Light has always meant creation, which is what America itself is all about. We live with a degree of freedom here that leaves us room to create, to invent, to transform into realities the dreams that enrich each other and the world. Light is this nation's native element.
Gazing up at those lights this past Monday night, I thought of their lineage. In the Bible, the first command God speaks upon the face of the deep is "Let there be light." In metaphor, in cliché, in almost every way mankind has ever talked about it, or tried to grasp it, light is the element of life, of strength, of truth. When we speak of the dawning of a new age of knowledge and reason, we call it the Enlightenment. In Dante's "Inferno," having journeyed down into deepest hell, the poet finally climbs up to see the stars. In Milton's "Paradise Lost," the poet--who, being blind, knew plenty about darkness--asks for inner light to tell the mighty story of the fall of mankind: "What in me is dark / Illumine, what is low raise and support."
The site of this memorial being the financial district, all of this also set me to musing on a marvelous study published in the mid-1990s by a Yale University economist, William Nordhaus, who took a close look at the history, and the real value, of light itself. Mr. Nordhaus's argument is that we are richer even than the numbers that gauge our wealth tell us. We have no good way to measure the full benefit of many of our more marvelous inventions--including the technology that in our time makes light so cheap and abundant as to supply any average working person with a wealth of illumination in many forms far beyond the reach of ancient emperors and kings. Mr. Nordhaus notes that in the 1.4 million years since our Australopithecus ancestors first used fire, and even in the thousands of years since fat-burning lamps and candles came into use, it is only in the past two centuries that we have made the great leap from oil and candles to lamps powered by electricity.
Or, for a sample of how it was only 150 years or so ago, take a look at one of America's most superb novels, "Moby Dick"--whose author, Herman Melville, was well acquainted with the byways and wharves of Manhattan, this same island from which these beams of light now rise. Melville created a character called Ishmael, and signed him on to a whaling ship, a mission that in those days meant mainly a quest for whale oil with which to light the lamps of the age. Ishmael--speaking across the years, tells us that in his time the stuff of light is so precious that except aboard whaling ships, it is the lot of the common sailor "to dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in the darkness to his pallet."
Now we are able to honor our dead with lights that can reach a mile into the sky. It is a memorial that also does honor to our future, a reminder that we are the pioneers of a way of life capable of colossally enriching the future of all mankind.
It was the very soul of such progress that came under attack on Sept. 11, as terrorists turned our own technology and trusting ways against us. To defeat such darkness needs far more than simply a display of light. But as a sign of resolve and of understanding of what we are fighting for, there could be no symbol more appropriate. And I know that when the 11 p.m. deadline came for the lights to go off--not only Monday night, but Tuesday, when I went back for the balm of a second look up close--there were folks on the street who, even after the lights had faded out, went on, for a moment, looking up.
Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."
