A decade later...

All through my childhood, I remember people around me mentioning how they would never forget where they were, and what they were doing, the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I always wondered how a historical event could cause so many people, even in different parts of the world, to feel like they were a part of that event.

9/11 was just such a date for many of us.

Ten years ago today, I was getting ready to go to school, to a modernism class I was taking as a non-degree student at a nearby university. That fall, I was taking advantage of their community service program, which allowed me to register and take a class for a minimal fee. Though I was about as old as the professor, whose name, Desmond Hamlet, couldn't have been more literary, I was perhaps the most eager student in that class.

But not that day.

Confused and horrified, like everyone else, I had watched the TV morning news at home, as I was long used to do each morning (that's how I saw, more than a decade earlier, Challenger disappear in a puff of smoke on screen), and had listened to the car radio all the way from our home to the university. I went to class, uncertain of what was going on (it would be a long while before we knew it had been a terrorist attack on the Twin Towers), uncertain of how we could possibly hold class on a day like that. I had no cellphone so I had no way to call my husband at work and ask for his thoughts and to give and seek comfort.

As I walked into the classroom, I saw that the other students, so much younger than I and wholly inexperienced in this kind of horror, were quite agitated and had very little access to news and information. This was way before the time of PDAs and laptops so we were all equally lost.

Then Prof. Hamlet walked in and said, in his deep, resonant voice and British accent, and very calmly: "Though we are still unclear of the reasons behind what has happened today, it is undoubtedly a most horrifying event. For the next hour, let's seek refuge in the world created by William Faulkner (we were studying The Sound and the Fury). Later, there will be plenty of time to deal with what has happened this morning. For now, let's immerse ourselves in literature."

And so we did. Now that I am a professor I will never forget Professor Hamlet's aplomb and his ability to calm us down and make us focus on the task at hand, that of making sense of Faulkner's confusing masterpiece, a blessed respite from the reality that was unfolding beyond our classroom, a reality more incomprehensible and unfathomable than anything fiction could have imagined.