The whole picture
ET CETERA The Whole picture M How will our public memory of the September 11 events be formed? Do the indelible images of destruction and mayhem seen on television and in newspaper...
...And plenty of them...
...More important, it represents an effort to appropriate the moral enormity of the September 11 events on a more human scale by the application of individual intelligence...
...Much depends on getting the whole picture, and that includes the unseen picture...
...Will "the mastering of reality" (to borrow critic and novelist Gabriel Josipovici's terms) be restricted to "the compulsive repetition of gestures and cliches...
...Diarists wrote most faithfully during WWII, creating what has been called "the richest source of material available to social historians of the period...
...Our future political actions depend on how public memory is shaped...
...Democratic pluralism is essential to both history and public memory...
...Memory dedicated to "the mastering of that which is painful," rather than the "masochistic turning of the screw of pain" certainly will help each of us recover our balance— and keep it...
...From two archives come calls for such voices, calls that capture the moral imagination...
...But more than our individual sanity is at stake...
...Mass-Observation has been Commonweal 7 October 26,2001 in this business for a while...
...Five hundred volunteers emerged...
...That's all to the good...
...Commonweal 8 October 26,2001...
...What we need are reflective, considered voices...
...Vital things we hope: A memorial written in the light of history, idiosyncratic no doubt, and probing, one would expect...
...One archive is elite, and the other demotic...
...Begun in 1937, to construct "an anthropology of ourselves," Mass-Observation founders solicited average Britons to keep diaries of everyday life in monthly installments...
...Given the vast record promised by print and video culture, what might this slender file of notes by distinguished academics, archivists, historically minded public servants, and public intellectuals add...
...And so did an unexpected archive, when history intervened...
...In England, the Mass-Observation Project at the University of Sussex has just asked 450 writers to keep a thematic diary reflecting on the attacks, as well as the unfolding political and military aftermath...
...Do the indelible images of destruction and mayhem seen on television and in newspaper photographs suffice...
...The Massachusetts Historical Society, the oldest such society in the United States, has solicited its elected members for written reflections on September 11...
Vol. 128 • October 2001 • No. 18
