Bercovitch was an unlikely character for Harvard, a son of Canadian Jewish radicals (they had named him after the anarchist martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti) who began his career as a dairy farmer on a kibbutz in Israel. He described returning to Canada and becoming a manager at a grocery store, where his bosses funded him to attend night school out of embarrassment that someone in management lacked a degree. Though a giant in his field, in person he was unassuming, a little stooped, with big eyes and a permanent, mischievous smile. He was semi-retired by the time I got into his seminar, teaching just for the fun of it.
He took a liking to me, and hired me as a research assistant on his massive project of editing The Cambridge History of American Literature. I was happy to have the work, the pocket money, and the time around such an eminent scholar, though by now I was beginning to realize for certain that I would not become an English professor like him or my parents. Under his influence, I would write my thesis about another Puritan sermon, less famous than Winthrop’s, a paean to the early missionaries’ “errand into the wilderness.”
A generation after Winthrop, in 1670, Samuel Danforth gave a classic jeremiad excoriating his followers and society for forgetting their purpose in coming to the New World:
Now let us sadly consider whether our ancient and primitive affections to the Lord Jesus, his glorious Gospel, his pure and Spiritual Worship and the Order of his House, remain, abide and continue firm, constant, entire and inviolate. Our Saviour’s reiteration of this Question, What went ye out into the Wilderness to see? is no idle repetition, but a sad conviction of our dullness and backwardness to this great duty, and a clear demonstration of the weight and necessity thereof.
If Winthrop saw America becoming a blessed example of godly living to which all others might turn, Danforth spoke of America’s civilizing mission, to go out into wild and savage lands (“over the vast Ocean into this waste and howling Wilderness,” he said) and make them more like the image of heaven on earth.
In my senior thesis, I drew a line from this thinking to America’s Cold War insistence on invading Vietnam to “save” it from godless Communism, leading to a different and doomed errand into the jungle. I compared the American government’s narrative about Vietnam with the views of outside commentators like the British novelist Graham Greene, whose novel The Quiet American bore out his skepticism of America’s purposes. In Greene’s novel, based partly on real events, an idealistic young American intelligence operative winds up contributing to a terrorist attack in Vietnam, all with the best of intentions. “Innocence,” Greene observes in the novel, “is like a dumb leper that has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.” Greene’s world-weary, English, Catholic outlook could not have been more different from the Puritan-inflected American understanding of its Cold War mission.
Though my focus was America, I also took courses in Arabic. In high school I had read the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih’s masterpiece, Season of Migration to the North, which tells of an African graduate student’s romantic conquest of several young British women in a sort of inverted version of the plot of Heart of Darkness. Just from the linguistic rhythm and the poetic richness of the translated language, I could sense how beautiful the Arabic prose must have been, and I wanted to learn the original. Plus, a bit vaguely, I figured that knowing Arabic would be useful for a future career in public service or journalism.
It was hard—much harder than the French and Spanish I had studied in high school, or even the Maltese (also a Semitic language) that I had picked up from my father. But it was also a highly rewarding language to learn. At first the English-speaking learner struggles to grab hold of something, since there are almost no similarities between our words and theirs. But after a year or two of learning, the structure of the language begins to unfold and reveal itself—and unlike almost any other language, you can derive most words you don’t know by using the words you do know. After a while it’s all prefixes, suffixes, and rearrangement of a few vowels to make whole families of words according to strict patterns. It all works by analogy: you can take the same changes you make to the word for “cooking” to get the word for “kitchen,” and do it to the word for “writing” to get the word for “office.”
When I showed up in late 2000, not many people were studying Arabic. I don’t think there were more than a dozen of us in that first-year class my freshman fall. Most were Arab or Jewish students interested in getting in touch with personal roots. We knew the Middle East was important, but we had no idea that one year later the entire trajectory of America’s relationship with the Muslim world would shift.
WHEN THE PLANES HIT, I was facedown on the bottom bunk, oblivious to the sunbeams angling in through the old windowpanes of my sophomore quarters in Leverett House. It was my dorm-mate, Uzo—rarely one to wake before I did—who knocked on the door, walked in, and said, “Hey, Peter, you might want to see this.” Soon there were four or five of us gathered on the futon in the next room, watching the Today Show coverage as the idea that we had lived to see the End of History collapsed with the two towers.
That Tuesday happened to be registration day. At midday, not knowing what else to do, I walked to Harvard Yard to sign up for classes. Everyone seemed to be in a daze, and wide-eyed students everywhere, disproportionately from New York and Washington, were on their cell phones trying to call home, mostly without success. Standing at an interfaith prayer service hastily organized in Harvard Yard, I looked up and saw a lone fighter jet banking in the crisp and cloudless blue sky overhead, as if to advise all of us below that war was no longer going to be distant or theoretical for us.
After trying all day to call home, I finally got through in the evening and reassured my parents that I was all right. It now feels like an odd assurance to have had to make, since the attack happened hundreds of miles away, but that day it seemed as if we all had to check on each other for injury, as if anyone we cared about might have been harmed that morning just by being in the same world where this had happened. A few days earlier I had turned up at Logan Airport with my bags packed for school; this morning, some men had stepped on that same curb, walked through that same concourse, boarded a half-empty airplane, and murdered their way into a new chapter of world affairs. It was immediately clear that the project of my generation had just been reassigned in some way. The infinite peace of post–Cold War promise was in fact a mirage, and we would be dealing with matters we thought our grandparents’ generation had settled, having to do with war, terror, and freedom. It was hard not to think of that wall in Memorial Hall, and wonder how many of my classmates would wind up among a new generation of war dead.
There was a few days’ ellipsis in which politics seemed remote. As people were still being pulled out of the rubble and grief provoked us to say things like “We will never be the same,” America felt more decent in mourning. Articles were written about the death of irony, and for a moment it felt as if the vengeful return of history would give us all the seriousness of historians, grappling with the complex forces that had brought us to this point. We seemed, for those few days, not just wounded but morally aware. Within days President Bush was visiting a mosque, eloquently distinguishing between Islamist terrorism and Islamic people. “Islam is peace,” he said, in a speech largely forgotten today. “Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes.” Just weeks earlier, the nation had been obsessed with shark attacks and a philandering congressman; now we seemed to have matured overnight.