Looking at Norris

There is so much to say, I imagine. Today is about remembrance, recognition, and community. It is about pain and grief, joy and love, anger and forgiveness. And yet today is as inscrutable as the last April 16, a moment in time defying our ability to give it voice.

Which is why, by and large, I can’t say something sensible about it. The cures to my ailments are beyond my ability to write about them, to mull them over, to sit down with my friends and colleagues and make judgments. Virginia Tech’s tragedy has slipped away from language, falling into the soft spaces between what I think and what I say, the yawning gulf between the feeling surging up from deep inside of me to summon a wash of tears and the absolute solace I felt sitting in the dining hall and watching a stream of students dab at their eyes with their orange or maroon sleeves.

I woke up around 7 a.m. today to take a walk around campus before the day’s work began. The memorial here is more sadly beautiful than ever. One student’s family or friends even “planted” roses in the gravel so that her Hokie stone plaque looks as if it has been suddenly engulfed by a bloom of white magic.

But when I found myself staring up at Norris Hall, I knew that I had discovered what I went walking for. Circling this most aggrieved building, pulling on its doors, feeling the smooth Hokie stone that binds it to the rest of campus, it is unbelievable to me that last year, I too had class in that building, in one of those murderous room. And yet I, and many more, are here, and they, those 32 names inscribed on our memorial, are gone. Sitting in front of Norris Hall this morning, I was confounded.

It is the site of a great crime amidst the swirling joy and seriousness of a university campus. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there should be some sort of mark here, some sort of deathly image. There is nothing to mark the spot but new doors, a single candle and a bouquet of flowers. It is, in the sharp morning light reminiscent of last April 16, the same building I knew. But it cannot be that building that I knew.

I wish I could go inside Norris Hall today. I wish the doors were thrown open and the lights turned on so that I could pass through the crucible of realization: I mean that I want to remember the building on the inside, to look into the classrooms, to touch the walls and to remember that it wasn’t always this way, that it might not be this way again.

This is the irreconcilable issue of today for this Hokie. There is a place on campus, a place in the Hokie Spirit, a piece of me that is still not “right.”

By David Grant  |  April 16, 2008; 11:28 AM ET  | Category:  Southern Skeptic
Share: Email a Friend | Technorati | Del.icio.us | Digg | Facebook
Previous: Growing Up Too Fast | Next: Breaking Down the Abwaab

The comments to this entry are closed.