A Nation Mourns

By LANCE MORROW

The eye accepted what the mind could not: a sudden burst of white and yellow fire, then white trails streaming up and out from the fireball to form a twisted Y against a pure heaven, and the metal turning to rags, dragging white ribbons into the ocean. A terrible beauty exploded like a primal event of physics -- the birth of a universe; the death of a star; a fierce, enigmatic violence out of the blue. The mind recoiled in sheer surprise. Then it filled with horror.

One thought first of the teacher and her children -- her own and her students. One wanted to snatch them away from the sight and rescind the thing they had seen. But the moment was irrevocable. Over and over, the bright extinction played on the television screen, almost ghoulishly repeated until it had sunk into the collective memory. And there it will abide, abetted by the weird metaphysics of videotape, which permits the endless repetition of a brute finality.

In last week's grief, some people rebelled, a little brusquely, and asked whether the nation would be pitched into such mourning if, say, a 747 went down with 300 Americans. Chuck Yeager, protohero of the space age, observed, "I don't see any difference, except for the public exposure of the shuttle, between this accident and one involving a military or a commercial airplane."

That had the machismo of matter-of-factness. It is true that the tragedy played itself out to maximum dramatic effect: the shuttle, now boringly routine, lifting off and then annihilating itself in full view of the world. It is true that television pitched itself fervently into what has become its sacramental role in national tragedies -- first wounding with its vivid repetitions of the event, then consoling, grieving, reconciling, administering the anchor's unctions. It is true that Christa McAuliffe, a teacher representing all the right things in America, rode as a nonprofessional, an innocent, into space, and her death therefore seemed doubly poignant and unfair.

But the loss of the shuttle was a more profound event than that suggests. It inflicted upon Americans the purest pain that they have collectively felt in years. It was a pain uncontaminated by the anger and hatred and hungering for revenge that come in the aftermath of terrorist killings, for example. It was pain uncomplicated by the divisions, political, racial, moral, that usually beset American tragedies (Viet Nam and Watergate, to name two). The shuttle crew, spectacularly democratic (male, female, black, white, Japanese American, Catholic, Jewish, Protestant), was the best of us, Americans thought, doing the best of things Americans do. The mission seemed symbolically immaculate, the farthest reach of a perfectly American ambition to cross frontiers. And it simply vanished in the air.