Randomness

One day, man named Pasquale Buzzelli lived. 

Not unusual to live, I know.  But Pasquale was in a North Tower of the World Trade center when the tower collapsed on September 11, 2001.  He lived while 1,402 others in the same tower perished—most as the tower collapsed around them.

Some confusion remains about Pasquale’s exact location as the tower crashed in on itself.  He was certainly in Stairwell B and descending.  Pasquale thought he had just reached the 22^nd floor of the structure, though other sources, including another of the 16 survivors of the collapse, thought he was on the 13^th floor.

As the upper floors began to pancake down, the building trembled mightily.   The rumbling intensified.  When the stairs buckled, Pasquale Buzzeli dove for a corner.  He awoke atop a pile of rubble a couple of hours later, numb and in a seemingly otherworldly place.  An intense fire raged nearby.  Responders had to fight back the fire to rescue him.

Thousands of people perished all around Pasquale.  People he could reach out and touch in Stairwell B at the instant it disintegrated around him vanished utterly.

Why did Pasquale Buzzelli live?

He was neither the youngest nor the oldest there that day.  He was not the most pious man.  He was not the most able or most kind.   He thought only about his wife and unborn child as he dove for a corner in the crumpling stairwell.

In Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, that rope bridge, high in the Andes Mountains, collapses in the very first sentence.  Five people crossing the bridge at the moment of collapse tumble to their deaths inside a deep ravine.  A Catholic friar monk named Brother Juniper was about to step onto the bridge himself at the moment of the catastrophe.   The question he asked immediately following his witnessing of the failure of the Bridge of San Luis Rey was not why the bridge failed.  The question:  Why, out of the hundreds of travellers crossing the bridge daily, were those five on the planks when the bridge fell?

The novel then follows Brother Juniper for six years as he investigates the lives of the five victims prior to that instant of demise.  Using formulas and ratings for such things as goodness, piety, and usefulness, Brother Juniper attempts to determine if the five died of mere happenstance or as part of God’s ultimate plan.  Had they each done something wrong?  Is retributive justice part of this life?  Do good things happen to good people?  Do bad things happen to bad people?

Why did Pasquale Buzzelli live?

Did some pattern or intelligent design allowed him to live?

Was it happenstance or design that reckoned the death of the others?

Pasquale slowly recovered from his injuries following his rescue from the rubble of the North Tower.  He often thought about those he could reach out and touch at the moment he dove in the stairwell.  He now lives with “survivor guilt.”   

What of those other people?

The answers are never satisfying.   Not for Brother Juniper.  Not for Pasquale Buzzelli.

--Mitchell Hegman