Seven Miles
On a recent Sunday, I boarded the bus downtown, having picked an arbitrary destination that, having reached it, I could then pause and take stock of my journey, turn around, and return home. So far I have found the D.C. public transportation system straightforward enough to navigate, barring my momentary disorientation transferring between the correct lines at L’Enfant Plaza on my way home from work. Depending on which way I sit getting on the former lines, I sometimes lose track of where I should be and have, just once, gotten on the wrong line in the opposite direction.
It felt like early spring in the middle of February, an unusual event that was becoming increasingly normal in this rapidly stranger world, or at least in the sun it felt that way. That, combined with the snow and hail for most of the night before, made me want to leave my apartment and enjoy the fresh air while there was any sun at all. In a string bag I had a pen, notebook, and the novel I was reading, The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth.
I had had the bag for at least four or five years. Early on in my freshman year at college, I had put a strip of blue painter’s tape on it to differentiate it from the other identical bags that the other students carried around with them. After moving me into my new apartment, my mother turned to me and said, “one more thing,” and then proceeded to rip off that piece of painter’s tape, since, by this point, it served no functional purpose. The notebook I’d started using at the beginning of 2015 and continue to presently, though it’s nearing the end so I imagine I’ll need another one sooner or later. The Ghost Writer was a small enough volume that I had snuck it into my bags while moving after I had already gotten the OK on the medium sized stack of books to bring with me.
On the bus ride down, I passed a theatre company that several of my friends had alluded to in our conversations thus far, and it was helpful to put a building to the description. After heading south on the bus, I got off at a stop near the end of the line and headed west for about a mile. Part of this stretch was me retracing a route I had taken when I was here visiting in October, eager to connect my far-flung memories of the city into one unified map.
When I reached Washington Circle, I turned south toward the Lincoln memorial and beyond, passing through parts of the George Washington University campus along the way. I knew that the State Department building was located near here, but I did not realize exactly where until I was face-to-face with a building that stated “U.S. State Department.” By that point, the Lincoln memorial was quite visible down the street as I continued on.
The centrality of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln memorial in D.C. made me think of the so-called memory district in the center of Berlin when I was there nearly two years ago. Both as a part of a class and of my own volition, I often wandered parts of Berlin when I had nothing better to do. These memorials, for different groups who were murdered and persecuted by the Nazis, are more abstract than the monuments of Washington to several of the great men of U.S. history. I had seen the Lincoln memorial and Washington monument before, today my destination was the FDR memorial, just south looking out on the body of water known as the Tidal Basin. After crossing Independence Avenue Southwest, I passed the newer Martin Luther King Jr. memorial on my way into West Potomac Park. Three years ago a professor of mine held a discussion about the memorial and the question of the scrubbing of Dr. King’s faith and work as a reverend from the memorial. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what the exact conclusion of that conversation was, but I do remember that as the start of my casual interest in public memorials.
Eventually, I made my way into the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, which was not exactly what I was expecting. It felt more like a stone park, with statues and quotations from throughout his presidency marking the ground and walls. I noticed upon exiting the memorial that one could walk directly along the Tidal Basin, at which point I stopped and sat down on a bench to take pictures. Several trees had grown over the path, making it more treacherous for bicyclists to go by without ducking, lest they fall into the water. There was also a bridge that led to the Thomas Jefferson memorial.
I didn’t initially plan to go to the Jefferson memorial, but I decided that I might as well while I was in the area. I crossed the bridge and followed the edge of the basin until I was on its steps. Its classical style (read: the columns) reminded me of the Lincoln memorial, only Jefferson was standing and the monument as a whole was open on all sides, rather than on just the one. There was also a sign near the base of the statue that noted that demonstrations were not allowed in order to preserve the tranquility of the monument, which elicited more of a reaction for me than I was anticipating.
Perhaps in light of the Lincoln Memorial’s history for being the site of major demonstrations, but also my time in Berlin had led to significant contemplation about how the U.S. remembers its history, namely how the U.S. often has a significant amount of historical amnesia, despite having spent comparatively less history existing as a governing nation than many of its counterparts. This is to say, many memorials present their subjects entirely uncritically. Thus the FDR memorial does not address Japanese internment, nor does Jefferson’s address the fact that our third president was a slaveholder. Interestingly enough, it was FDR who laid the cornerstone of the Jefferson memorial in 1939.
Part of the difference is temporal, and part is cultural. Both Germany and Berlin itself were divided in two for 41 years, and thus the debates that raged in the two Germanys over how to talk about the shared Nazi past came further into focus when they reunified into one Germany. Consequently, some of the most central memorials to the Nazis’ victims have only been erected in the last 20 years or so, such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism, the Memorial and Information Place for the Victims of National Socialist Euthanasia Killings, and the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism, to name several. Even then, these memorials have not been without controversy for how they go about remembering the past.
The United States has not had, in either duration or type, a period of division like Germany, though of particular interest in the United States memory debates is what to do about the statues, monuments, and memorials to former Confederates who fought to secede from the Union during the Civil War. Of course, a particularly thorny question is how can a monument, made of stone, metal, or some other building material, be truly critical? This, and the memory debates in Germany, were on my mind while visiting the Jefferson memorial, both because of Jefferson’s own history and also the presence of the small sign noting that demonstrations would not be permitted, as if to say it was not permitted to disturb the image it creates.
I had reached the farthest point in my expedition and turned around, walking back over the bridge, back along the Basin, back through the FDR memorial, this time through the MLK memorial, and headed east in the direction of the Washington monument, which I only passed. I started walking up 16th Street, looking for a place to sit down, drink some coffee, and recharge for a few minutes before I walked the rest of the way home. I ended up at a Starbucks about a block away from the White House, which would close at four, about an hour from now. So I ordered a drink, sat down, and opened my book.
I have since finished The Ghost Writer and I quite enjoyed it. It’s the first appearance of his fictional alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman, and it focuses on Zuckerman’s meeting as a young man with his literary idol, the author E. I. Lonoff. Without delving too much into plot details, the main plot (disregarding Zuckerman’s digressions into his own backstory) centers on Zuckerman’s night and subsequent morning at the Lonoff residence. This is the third of Roth’s novels that I can remember reading; the others are The Plot Against America and American Pastoral, another novel narrated by Nathan Zuckerman.
Although I think I was too young to fully grasp The Plot Against America at the time, since I was in middle school or maybe at the latest, early high school, I remember the feeling of familiarity reading something narrated by a character who was Jewish like myself and it taking place in Newark, near the suburban town where I grew up. In American Pastoral too, there was a Jewish protagonist and various references to places in northern New Jersey that I either knew of personally (such as a neighborhood about a mile or so from me), or that I at least knew of in one way or another. In a sense, The Ghost Writer hit close to home, sometimes in ways that were more often literal than thematic.
After reading for a time, I left shortly before it closed, and walked north until I finally reached home and collapsed onto the couch, exhausted from all the walking. Putting the distance into Google Maps later I realized that, without including the distance I rode on the bus, I had walked about seven miles since I had left my apartment nearly four or five hours earlier.
