Incorporating the death of Osama Bin Laden into the 9/11 Museum
Posted: May 5, 2011 Filed under: Museum News | Tags: 9/11 Memorial and Musuem Leave a comment »
Alice Greenwald, director of the museum
NBC reports that the 9/11 Museum and Memorial is working to incorporate Osama Bin Laden’s death into the narrative of their exhibition.
“Everything we do is looked at through the lens of being at a memorial site,” said Greenwald. “We include the story of the perpetrators not to elevate them, not for this to be the museum that profiles Osama bin Laden.”
“They are in the story, in the role they assumed, which was murderers,” Greenwald added.
The new bin Laden chapter will not mark the end of the historical exhibition. The museum says it will be able to add new exhibits for any future 9/11-related events.
NYT Slays 9/11 Museum Virgil Quote
Posted: April 7, 2011 Filed under: Museum News | Tags: 9/11 Memorial and Musuem, Aneid, Human Remains, Virgil Leave a comment »
Nisos and Euryalos from the Louvre
The National 9/11 Memorial and Museum has gotten some heat this week over their plans to store the unidentified bone fragments of those who died in the 9/11 attack inside the museum. The human remains would be kept out of sight from visitors behind a wall artfully featuring a quote from Virgil’s Aneid: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.”
Sounded good to me. But Caroline Alexander with the New York Times writes:
Anyone troubling to take even a cursory glance at the quotation’s context will find the choice offers neither instruction nor solace.
Virgil’s epic relates the trials of the unhappy Trojan hero Aeneas, who, as Troy burns, flees with the remnants of his family and people to his ships and the sea, eventually winding up in Italy, where it is his destiny to lay the foundation of what will become Rome.
The immediate context of the quotation is a night ambush of the Rutulian enemy camp by two Trojan warriors, Nisus and Euryalus, whose mutual love is described in terms of classical homoerotic convention and whose deaths represent one of the epic’s famously sentimental set pieces. Falling on the sleeping enemy, the two hack away with their swords, until the ground reeks with “warm black gore.” Stripping the murdered soldiers of their armor, the two are in turn ambushed by a returning Rutulian cavalry troop. As each Trojan tries to save his companion, both are killed, brutally and graphically. At this point the poet steps in to address them directly:
“Fortunati ambo! si quid mea carmina possunt, nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo.”
“Happy pair! If aught my verse avail, no day shall ever blot you from the memory of time.” (The translation here is from the famously literal Loeb edition.) At dawn’s light, the severed heads of the two Trojans are paraded by the enemy on spears.
The central sentiment that the young men were fortunate to die together could, perhaps, at one time have been defended as a suitable commemoration of military dead who fell with their companions. To apply the same sentiment to civilians killed indiscriminately in an act of terrorism, however, is grotesque.
Perhaps we should find something from Homer?
Artist's rendering of 9/11 Virgil wall. Courtesy of the New York Times
