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American Morning

Interview with Anna Quindlen, Columnist

Aired May 30, 2002 - 08:53   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: It's graduation season, the first since 9/11, and this year's graduates are heading out into a world that has changed dramatically since they started college.

Author and columnist Anna Quindlen makes several commencement addresses a year, and wrote a book base on one, "A Short Guide to a Happy Life," and she joins us now -- What a pleasure to see you. Welcome.

ANNA QUINDLEN, AUTHOR, "A SHORT GUIDE TO A HAPPY LIFE": Good to see you, Paula.

ZAHN: So how different are commencement addresses this year?

QUINDLEN: Well, for me, they're not different at all. The difference is in how the message is apprehended out there. I've been speaking for years about the fact that these students have to work to find balance in their lives. I think the touchstone for me is a quote if from a letter to Senator Paul Tsongas someone once sent him that said, "no man ever said on his deathbed, I wish I had spent more time at the office." I used to get a little resistance on that in the past, particularly from parents. Now that people know that the last thing those people in the twin towers did was not to try clinch a deal, but to pick up their cell phones and call people and say, I love you, tell the kids I love them, that message has resonance, and verisimilitude in a way that it never has before.

ZAHN: Do you also think that because there is so much tension in this post September 11 environment that people want to play it safer in these addresses?

QUINDLEN: No, I don't feel that so much. I think that people are looking within in a concerted way since this happened, looking in terms of, If I went off to work on a beautiful September day, and discovered that it was the last day of my life, what would I have left behind? And I think that that's why commencement speeches this year are tending towards the personal rather than the political.

ZAHN: I'm just curious why you were met with resistance from some parents before with that very same message you've been espousing for many years?

QUINDLEN: Oh, because -- come on, it was the legacy of the go-go 80s and 90s, which was get out there, take over the world, masters of the universe, let's -- I mean, the old message used to be change the world now, to some extent the message was rule the world. That sense that ambition was the ruling principle. I think that's something we've definitely peeled back from since September 11.

ZAHN: You have more recently written about 9/11 -- and I wanted to put up on the screen a small part of a piece you wrote in "Newsweek" magazine talking about what you think should ultimately happen at ground zero.

And you write, in only the way that you can write, "the tragic cavern in lower Manhattan is not a design or development problem, but a test of the spiritual and emotional depth of an entire nation. The answer is to honor the emptiness by leaving it as a mute memorial. Are we a people so pinched of heart that we would trade memory for real estate? If so, the terrorists have really won."

So you see this place as needing to be a memorial to those almost 3,000 people who lost their lives there.

QUINDLEN: I really do. There is something really powerful about the fact that there is nothing there now. I went down last week before I wrote this column. I have the same reaction every time I go. I stand on the sidelines, and I start to cry. And I don't think this is the moment for conventional thought about memorializing what happened here. That's why I talk in that same column about Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam War Memorial which was so controversial and is so spectacularly successful...

ZAHN: So stark.

QUINDLEN: ... because it transcends our usual notions of how to pay homage. It just seems to me that to remember what happened here is to let it remain as it is.

ZAHN: Thank you very much for dropping by to share some of your thoughts with us this morning and all of our attention will turn back to ground zero at 10:00 when CNN will be going back to the site as the bells start to toll at 10:29 to remind us of the time that that second tower collapsed.

QUINDLEN: Thanks, Paula.

ZAHN: Take care. Look forward to reading your pieces down the road. She had another one lately on the value of boredom for children during the summer. It is a very good thing isn't it? It's my favorite column.

QUINDLEN: Doing nothing is something.

ZAHN: We all feel guilty when our kids aren't doing anything. They need this air to breathe, don't they?

QUINDLEN: They do. Especially to develop creativity. A lot of being a writer is just walking around looking like you are doing nothing. ZAHN: And you talked about how your writing was inspired by lying back on summer days, looking at the clouds, looking at the grass growing.

QUINDLEN: And being bored out of my gourd. That's right.

ZAHN: May we all have some boredom this summer.

QUINDLEN: Absolutely.

ZAHN: Take care. Look forward to, once again, seeing those columns down the road.

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