Unless you’ve been bedridden for the past few weeks, you’ve without a doubt seen them around campus: the big, shockingly red, somewhat disorienting archways standing in front of the most frequented buildings on each quad, causing pedestrians to take detours to avoid walking under them for some inexplicable reason. Some have pejorative signs tacked up on them; some are lying on the ground in three pieces, the targets of student discontentment.

According to an e-mail I just received from the Human Ecology administration, the uppercase name for the arches is “Diversity Archways,” and they’re scattered about the campus in commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the phrase “Open Doors, Open Hearts, Open Minds.” Also according to the e-mail, some of the arches are slated for interactive projects; the one in front of Martha Van Rensselaer Hall has been opened up as public forum, and members of the Human Ecology community are invited to “write down [their] thoughts using the rainproof materials provided, and … [s]taple them any way [they] wish to the archway using the staple guns and ladder provided.”

This whole arch thing brings up three interesting questions. One, have we become so desperate for things to commemorate that we’re now marking the anniversaries of phrases? Two, how much is Cornell paying in liability insurance to cover the countless injuries that will invariably result from the unfortunate combination of staple guns and ladders? Three, and most importantly, why are we, as a culture, so goddamned bad at memorializing?

It’s a question that has crossed my mind too many times lately. A couple of weeks ago, I made the mistake of watching the ABC benefit concert for Hurricane Katrina victims, which was a lesson in tactlessness. The concert, entitled “Shelter from the Storm,” featured famous musicians performing such flood-related classics as “The Water is Wide,” “Who Will Stop the Rain” and some song by Green Day that mentioned rain pouring down (played, for maximum impact, while footage of sobbing and desolate Louisianans rolled). By the time Kanye West rapped a piece — presumably written specially for the occasion — that rhymed “have no home” with “live in the Superdome,” I had been moved to actual nausea.

This is literalism at its worst, the result of a desire to tailor memorializing so severely to the event that there is no room left for symbolism. It is the driving force behind monuments like the relatively new Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C., which features statues of 18 non-descript soldiers — everymen, meant to represent the entirety of American troops — poised in combat. Out of place among rows of neatly groomed shrubbery and bright floral arrangements, the slightly-larger-than-life statues form a group of anonymous men lost in both place and time. The arrangement is more likely to evoke cognitive dissonance than silent reflection.

An over-reliance on literalism is just one of the problems that plagues American memorializing. At the other end of the spectrum is an excess of symbolism — layers upon layers that tend more towards tackiness than remembrance. The epitome of this is the new World War II memorial, also in D.C.; its creators overshot “stately” and wound up squarely in the land of “visual cacophony.” It is a mess of columns and waterfalls, a rococo explosion of highly-polished marble accented with gleaming copper. It’s exactly how one imagines Donald Trump’s bathroom.

And then, of course, we come to commercialism, the third curse of American memorializing. Immediately after the World Trade Center terrorist attacks in 2001, the market was flooded with “tribute” merchandise ranging from the ubiquitous “Always Remember” t-shirts and bumper stickers to a refrigerator magnet emblazoned with a photograph of the towers that played “America the Beautiful” when a button was pressed. These are media better suited to such profound statements as “I’m with stupid” and “It’s not a beer belly, it’s the gas tank to a sex machine.” There’s something inherently trivializing about it; it implies that the memorialized event can be understood with a simple depiction of what happened, a single frame with some hackneyed phrase beneath it. And that our wounds can be healed with the simple application of money.

But it seems that, faced with something overwhelming, the human tendency is to try to shrink it down to something comprehensible and easily fixed. No event suffers from this more than the World Trade Center attacks, which left such a gaping chasm in the American psyche that memorialization plans — to fill that aching void — began right away, before the impact of the event could even begin to be understood. Four years later, we’ve been through two official blueprints and innumerable failed attempts, and all of them are unsatisfying. They embody all three of the pitfalls of American memorializing: they are too literal, calling for enormous buildings to fill the empty space in the skyline; they have too many layers of symbolism, suggesting towers 1776 feet tall with spiraling, open-air latticework and names like “The Freedom Tower”; and making office space available is, of course, a consideration in downtown Manhattan.

More than anything, though, the flaw in these plans is that they memorialize the buildings, which are the least important thing we lost. Those who lost their lives will no doubt have a monument at the base of whatever structure is built, but what will pay tribute to the loss of American swagger, to that aching void? The answer is clear: erect whatever buildings will best suit the commercial needs of the district, but leave the sky empty. I need to see that hole in the skyline, to remind me of the columns of black smoke that I saw standing there four years ago. I need to see that hole in the skyline when I’m driving home across the Triboro Bridge. I don’t want it filled.