Another week of remembering 9/11 has nearly passed, the fiery imolations, the destruction of the WTC, destruction at the Pentagon, and death in the hills of Pennsylvania. There have been some very interesting new perspectives taken on the events and aftermath, and we should understand these to be part of the long process of finding a good place in our memories to file this awful event. Among the more poetic new renderings of 9/11 was that penned by John Carroll, a columnist of the Boston Globe. He concluded his "The end of civilization" article on Monday with this: ...In that destruction, we saw the destruction of the mainspring of meaning and hope -- not the clash of civilization, but the end of it. This was more than a sense of individual mortality, the sure knowledge of a coming death that each one carries. We humans live with that by assuming the open-ended continuation of other lives, our children and their children -- on into the indefinite future. But on 9/11, we saw the future itself as mortal.
Originally published at A.L.P.