Everything is illuminated

The best time to take in the new Pentagon Memorial? 1 a.m.

The Pentagon Memorial "is intimate," said Jason DeRose of National Public Radio, "inviting you to sit alone on one of those cantilevered benches and ask yourself what September 11th means." (Wiqan Ang/Globe Staff)

IN THE DARKNESS, from a distance, the park is a sea of glowing spots - indistinct, eerie, even spectral.

But up closer, details emerge. Row after row of stainless steel benches curve up from the ground like fins, or wings of a creature arrested in motion. These 184 benches hover over 184 pools of illuminated water, one for each man, woman, and child killed at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

I've long had a thing for visiting memorials at night. When I lived in Washington, I loved to go to the FDR Memorial in the wee hours, when the tour buses and the teenagers had gone and the bright sun had given way to the city lights and the stars, when the senses could be saturated by the sound of falling water. The blackness of night, of course, is evocative of death, but it is the stillness, I think, that transforms the experience; absent the familiar sights and sounds that distract our senses during the day, we are guided not by the footsteps of fellow travelers, but by our own response to architecture, to history, to memory, to loss.

So a few weeks ago, while in D.C. for a convention of religion writers, I persuaded two friends, Jason DeRose of National Public Radio and Cathleen Falsani of the Chicago Sun-Times, to join me on a 1 a.m. pilgrimage to the new Pentagon Memorial, which had been dedicated by President Bush just nine days earlier, on Sept. 11. The Pentagon park is the first 9/11 crash site memorial to be finished. The one in Shanksville is tied up in an intractable controversy over whether a crescent-shaped design is too evocative of Islam, while the one in New York is stalled by whatever it is that stalls everything associated with Sept. 11 in that city.

To approach the Pentagon at night was unsettling. The place was virtually abandoned, the signage was poor, and the surrounding area was desolate. The Pentagon loomed as a fortress, surrounded by vast, empty parking lots dotted with security booths whose black-tint glass made it impossible to see if anyone was inside watching. The office windows were also dark, although in one I could see an American flag hanging, not far from the point where terrorists brought down Flight 77, killing 125 at the Pentagon and all 59 aboard the plane.

When you enter the park, you are immediately reminded of the human loss at the core of this tragedy - the benches are arranged by the year of birth of the dead, so that the first bench you encounter, unavoidable and grim, bears the name of a 3-year-old, Dana Falkenberg. Dana was traveling with her 8-year-old sister and their parents, on the first leg of a trip to Australia. Her bench, like those of everyone on the plane, faces the Pentagon, in the direction of their flight's final moments; the benches representing those inside the building face out, toward the open sky from which the plane descended.

It was disorienting to visit the memorial before any particular public rituals have emerged, like making a pencil rubbing of a name at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, following the chronological utterances etched into the stones at the FDR Memorial, or leaving notes or a picture at Ground Zero. We felt uncertain how to interact with the park.

On some benches, there were flowers, perhaps left over from the dedication. In the dirt around a seedling, someone had stuck a tiny American flag. But in the dimness, the experience was almost entirely sensory. It was hard to make out the paths or read the victims' names, so we wandered along the gravel, stones crunching underfoot. We crouched at the benches, letting our fingers feel the engraved names, listening to the flowing water. In the air hung a faint scent from the baby paperbark maples planted to provide shade for grieving families, destined to mature along with the park.

Later that morning, I asked DeRose, who is an editor of NPR's "Day to Day" in Los Angeles, what he made of the memorial. He compared it to other notable sites of public mourning - the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, of course, but also the eternal flame at John F. Kennedy's gravesite, and the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem

"It is intimate, inviting you to sit alone on one of those cantilevered benches and ask yourself what September 11th means," DeRose wrote in an e-mail. "It's a work of art open to interpretation. It doesn't say 'Feel this. Think this. Believe this.' And that's what is should be - a memorial to a memory still taking place and the meaning of which we still don't know."

Falsani, who writes a religion column for the Sun-Times and who is the author of the new book about grace, "Sin Boldly," compared the benches to dolphins - a comparison, I later learned, that was first noted by the 2 1/2-year-old son of one of the memorial's builders.

"From a distance, and even as I walked among them, the underlit 'benches' looked like the dorsal fin of a diving dolphin - a pod of dolphins moving together," she wrote me. "Dolphins historically symbolize safe travel and were also used on ancient tombs - the Roman catacombs, for instance - to signify a love that remains even into the depths (of death, despair, etc.)."

But Falsani said that, for her, "perhaps the most effective and emotionally evocative part of the memorial wasn't a visual, but a sound: water flowing. Beneath each of the 'benches' is an underlit pool of water that seems to flow from one marker to the next. I took it to mean that the souls of those lost at the Pentagon on 9/11 continue on in the hereafter, and that we are still connected to them, just as they were connected to one another on that September morning 7 years ago."

A few days later, I picked up the phone and called Julie Beckman, the Philadelphia-based architect who, together with partner Keith Kaseman, spent 5 1/2½years designing the memorial. Beckman said the three criteria that stayed with them the entire time were that the park should have places for people to sit, trees to provide shade, and water to facilitate reflection.

"It is a place that's not necessarily representational of the event or the people that lost their lives, and that is primarily because we have strongly felt that September 11 was experienced by so many people in so many different ways," she said. "We sought instead to create a place that simply invites thought and invites interpretation, and doesn't prescribe a particular feeling, or a way to remember that day."

As for my sense of uncertainty - in the darkness, without any explanatory material, about what exactly to make of the park - that, apparently, is the point. David Simpson, the author of "9/11: The Culture of Commemoration," told me that memorials must use certain architectural vocabulary or we won't recognize them as memorials - but the memorials must also innovate, or we won't acknowledge them as good. So we are left with echoes of the familiar, but also the challenge of the unfamiliar.

"The memorials work best when they say least, and they don't tell you what to think or what to feel," said Simpson, who is also an English professor at the University of California, Davis. "If we're not confused and upset by dead people, then we're missing the point."

Michael Paulson covers religion for the Globe. He blogs at boston.com/religion and can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com.