I witnessed parts of what happened on September 11 with my own ears and eyes –in that order: ears>the roar of the first plane over Western Tribeca and the crash into the North Tower, then eyes>the explosion of the South Tower into a huge mushrooming cloud of flame created as I discovered later by the second plane, which, observing from the North, I did not see. At a museum with a few of my friends about a year later, seeing a film of that moment of the black plane coming out of nowhere to plow into the tower we gasped, again, as shocked, more shocked. A murder had been committed, of thousands of people, of two buildings.

Over the years new buildings have been built, trees grow, a memorial is built, the nation goes on. Buildings representing capitalism were pulverized, but the city is plagued by a proliferation of new towers celebrating oligarchy.The planes stabbed at the heart of a city yet the city appeared to heal, but the country was mortally wounded. The attack was successful. The idea of this country, the illusion of exceptionalism was murdered, with the Trump regime evidence of the pustulent unhealed wound, the orange creature that burst into corrupt being in the explosion.

The war in Iraq in particular was a sin, a giant blundering into the unleashing of a cascade of local sectarian hatreds going back centuries which we had no understanding of, couldn’t even keep straight. We have yet to atone and we no longer pay attention.

Because September 11 and the days we lived through in its immediate aftermath were so intense, I have been thinking also of how much of has happened just to my group of friends since that day–not just the normal passage of time and ageing, and the loss of aged parents, but also shocking untimely losses and devastating illnesses.

The anniversary perhaps inevitably pushes one into the gloomily elegiac, it is so easy to fall into that tone. And it is of course not all gloom and doom on any one day, friendships have endured and new ones thrive, and there come days at this time of year which are exceptionally beautiful in the clarity and beauty of the light and the temperateness of the air. Then one emails a friend and says, it’s one of those September 11 blue skies and air.

The past week the Towers of Light have been turned on and off unpredictably. Last Thursday evening I saw this view from the Upper East Side, one beam piercing a foggy sky, the other beam stuck lower in the firmament. By the time I got home only a half hour later, the sky was clear and the lights gone, the previous view a mirage.

Here is the link to the texts and photo essays about September 11 and its aftermath that I’ve written and published on A Year of Positive Thinking over the years #9/11