Newtown, Connecticut: A Very American Tragedy – Spectator Blogs

I’ve not written anything for a few days because, well, I’ve been trying to organise what I think about the awfulness of the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. Trying, also, to find a way of writing about it that seems appropriate. There are moments, I think, when a too-polished piece of prose risks seeming distastefully narcissistic, too close to being from the School of Martin Amis. I remember Amis describing the “sharking” trajectory of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center more than a decade ago and thinking that, as apt and vivid as the image was, there was something unpleasant about it. Something that suggested the author was too admiring of his own imagery. The event made self-consciously fine writing seem superfluous and even oddly obscene.

And yet writing nothing is not quite possible either. We have, after all, been here before. For me, it was a cold, damp, spring morning in Blacksburg, Virginia five years ago.