There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
November 22nd. In the middle of the car wreck or the plunge down the
mountainside, or in the mind of the drowning, time slows, then stops-the way
it does for some Americans every year when the page of the calendar is torn
away and today's date revealed: November 22nd.
It is always 12:29 Dallas time when the motorcade comes into sight. Nothing
ever changes in the immutable past, no matter how much we want it to.
Emily Dickinson's certain slant of light is captured forever in the Zapruder
film we can't stop watching:
Click. The presidential limousine coming down Houston
makes a sharp left onto Elm.
Click. The president is smiling, waving.
Click. Mrs. Kennedy looks at him with concern.
Click. A bystander jerks his head suddenly toward
Dealey Plaza.
Click. The limousine is lost behind a street sign.
Click. The president reaches for his throat, slumps
toward his wife.
Click. The governor of Texas, seated in front of the
president, falls forward.
Click. The shattering impact.
Click. Mrs. Kennedy rises.
Click. She is pushed back into the car by a Secret
Service agent.
Click. The limousine disappears from view beneath an
underpass, headed for Parkland Hospital and history.
The film runs 15 seconds. And an eternity.
None of us will forget where we were when we heard. I was on the subway
heading for a job interview in Manhattan. A dirty, disheveled man came down
the aisle-nothing unusual in a New York subway-but he leaned over and
whispered something in my ear, and then moved on to whisper it to the next
passenger, and the next, and the next. It took me a while to make any
meaning of the slurred words, and then absorb them:
"They shot Kennedy in Dallas. They shot Kennedy in Dallas. They shot
Kennedy in Dallas."
I could see him enter the next car and do the same. Like the chorus of a
Greek tragedy telling the tale.
At last he knew something no one else did-at least for the moment. And he
had seized the moment. He had found a way to live in others' memories. He
would finally be important, memorable, somebody. Like a journalist with a
scoop.
I walked up out of the subway station in lower Manhattan to see a man about
a job, and everything seemed dirtier than usual, the din even more
depressing as I walked the couple of blocks to the gray office building.
The old editor I was meeting seemed defeated. We didn't talk about the job.
Instead, we looked out his office window to see Manhattan's flags being
lowered to half-staff one by one as the word spread and the afternoon light
turned yellow in New York's dingy canyons.
The editor talked about how it had felt the day FDR died.
Certain days stay in the mind. Like a film that is unwound and replayed
again and again. As much as you'd like to stop it. Each time. But you can't.
Years later, the phone would ring and I would turn the television on to see
the jetliners strike the buildings again and again. In an endless loop. As
much as you'd like to stop it, to turn it off, you can't.
To watch the Zapruder film is like that. It is to see the destruction of the
temple again and again. Nothing ever changes. It is always 12:29, Dallas
time, November 22, 1963.
Never again, one thought at the time, would Americans take their country so
lightly, their institutions so for granted.
But time passes and fortune changes, and some years the day passes almost
unnoticed.
Then some new crisis erupts, and people are reminded again of how fragile
society really is. We are jerked awake, and realize that life is shipwreck.
And that our way of life is not a machine that runs by itself after all, but
one that requires daily heroism. Suddenly awake, we look differently at the
uniforms that guard us while we sleep. And all it takes to remind us of the
fragility of life and power is just a date on the calendar and a certain
slant of light.