The most beautiful place in the world to die. Tyler Clementi… Dharun Ravi… the George Washington Bridge… and the necessity for remembrance.

by  Dr. Jeffrey Lant
Author’s program note. Tyler Clementi was a young violinist who with his obliging instrument produced sounds that touched the heart. Given world enough and time who knows where this undeniable talent, showcased in the Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra and Bergen Youth Orchestra, would have taken him?  But because he was attracted to men rather than to women, he was never to know. And so today, I sit here in Cambridge starring at a photograph of a dead boy we cannot afford to forget, for to forget would be the real crime…
… but memory is sharp, hard, remorseless, exquisitely painful…
And so we must have Mozart. Mozart who so well understood life… and who with such grandeur enables us to cope with death…
Thus, as the occasional music to this tale I give you the Master’s Requiem Mass in D Minor (K. 626), composed in Vienna (1791) available in any search engine…  Focusing on his life, whilst never forgetting his death and uneasy spirit…
The thousands of pages dedicated to the matter of Tyler Clementi focus on when he died, how he died, why he died, and, above all, who is responsible that he died… and I shall also deal with these crucial questions. But, first and foremost, we must never lose sight of the boy at the center of this matter… for this is above all his story…
Tyler was born in 1991 in Buffalo, New York and raised in  Ridgewood, New Jersey. He was a good student and like so many other aspiring musicians found life, beauty, meaning and sustenance in the celestial purity of sound, often so intense as to produce exaltation, apotheosis, catharsis, ecstasy. Tyler was one of the gifted who took mere notes on a page and produced beauty… and whenever he picked up his violin that beauty was his to command…. and to give…
… and he gave freely, liberally, with the exuberance and trust of youth and a heart that sought love and meant no harm to anyone…
And so Tyler Clementi went to Rutgers, to test himself against the best of his peers… He was just 18 years old… with a mere handful of days to live.  What happened next is now a matter of detailed record… why it happened will always require the judgement of Solomon and perhaps more… for the person we long to ask — Tyler himself — cannot tell us.
Dramatis personnae.
Now come the principal actors…
Tyler, his roommate Dharun Ravi, fellow hallmate Molly Wei… and the gaping worldwide community found on the Internet and without which there would have been no story, no tragedy, and a happier life for all.
Here is what happened….
On the nights of September 19 and 22, 2010 Clementi texted Ravi about using their room for the evening, a thing college students have been asking their roommates forever. On the first occasion Ravi met Clementi’s friend, an older man whom Ravi did not like. Nothing so far meant very much; surely no one thought that Tyler would be soon dead. But the mad chemistry of  tragedy had started… and it fermented in the brain of Dharun Ravi.
Ravi now says, as well he might, that he wasn’t  the agent provocateur for what happened, but as he stands convicted before the world, this is not surprising.
Fact: He thought it fitting and proper to use a webcam to view  a portion of Clementi’s dorm-room liaison with another man… and immediately tweeted it to his list of 150 people, thus beginning its viral dissemination.
Fact: Ravi posted text messages saying “Yeah, keep the gays away” and “People are having a viewing party with a bottle of Bacardi and beer in this kid’s room for my roommate”, along with directions on how to view it remotely.
Fact: Ravi set up his webcam and pointed it toward’s Clementi’s bed, where it was found by police, still so pointed.
All this Tyler learned…  and acted responsibly, complaining to his resident assistant and two other college officials. He also wrote in detail about these events on the “Just Us Boys” message board and  the Yahoo message board. He asked for a new room, a new roommate, and for help. He was doing what he had to do and he was doing it responsibly.
But here is where things went so very wrong…
“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.” (Hamlet)
But something gnawed at Clementi and so 38 times following his first webcam viewing he returned… returned… and returned again and again to that bit of video that he became convinced had destroyed his life, his future, his peace of mind. He was wrong, so very wrong, but he was young, inexperienced, and, he thought alone. And that is the real tragedy…
Thus did his dark purpose commence.
8:42 PM September 22.
The cast of characters was growing now. College administrators were now involved.. Ravi was back peddling as quick as he could, minimizing what he did, why he did it, stating over and over again that he meant nothing by it, didn’t mean it, apologized for it.
But already Tyler had his foot upon a very different  path… He was Hamlet now, without even knowing it:
“To be, or not to be: that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or take arms against a sea of troubles.”
He had solved this conundrum…. tragically, finally, unnecessarily… an act of passion from a mind in turmoil.  “The George Washington Bridge over the  Hudson is the most beautiful bridge in the world.” Le Corbusier
And it was here Tyler Clementi came to die, that is to say to do the extremest thing in his power… to embrace oblivion. What made him do this deed of rashness, to end everything and remove the future and every joy to come? We can never know, for his final words, sent on his cell phone from the great marvel towering above him, picked out in the brightest of lights, was brief, inadequate, far too little for such an epochal event:
“Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.”
And so he jumped, alive for seconds still… already gone from the living, en route to eternity, the last things he saw, the dark waters of the Hudson, the explosion of light that was Manhattan. Then nothing… a dead boy of enigmas and secrets which I so long to know but never shall.
Envoi.
On March 16, 2012 now 20 year old Dharun Ravi was convicted of invasion of privacy and bias intimidation, a hate crime. Wherever he goes in life, however long he lives, every day he will think on young Tyler Clementi, whose vivid memory and restive spirit will be ever present… “To die, to sleep/No more… Be all my sins remember’d.”