After

“There are no words.”

It was only happening a couple of dozen blocks away, but I’d come down from the roof, and was watching the World Trade Center attacks on the television, just like the rest of the planet. The second tower had just imploded, and the anchor on CNN said pretty much the only thing to stay with me all day. There are no words: it’s impossible to think, let alone write, the emotions and implications of something like this.

I saw a lot of it from my roof, a lot from television, a lot just riding around downtown Manhattan on my bicycle. The initial rush of adrenalin when we heard that a plane had flown into the first tower became unspeakable horror when we saw a second one do exactly the same thing: at a stroke, we knew this was the most horrific terrorist attack of all time. And then when things got worse by orders of magnitude when the towers collapsed… there are no words.

Yes, New Yorkers will now live in the knowledge that they are vulnerable, just like Londoners have done for years. But whatever has happened in London just doesn’t compare to this. I worked no more than three minutes’ walk from the World Trade Center for nearly all my time in New York, and I know every street corner on the television intimately. The Millenium Hilton (sic), Liberty Square Park, Vesey Street, West Street – they look a bit like they do after a big ticker-tape parade, only instead of being covered in celebratory paper, they’re covered in the aftermath of tragedy and death. I spoke to one friend today who told of a New York Post photographer who had body parts flying past her on the West Side Highway; the guy next door to me in my apartment building was on the 30th floor and, although he got out fine, saw dozens of people either jump or fall out of the 80th story.

Rudy Giuliani has really come through today; when he gave a press conference and announced that the fire chief and his deputy – both good friends of his – had died, but at the same time kept his eye very much on the bigger picture, he seemed a thousand times the man that George Pataki, to his right, or George W. Bush, earlier on the television, had. Far too many politicians, reporters, and pundits have spewed far too many platitudes about evil and the loss of life; most of us in New York aren’t going to be able to come to terms with the magnitude of what has happened for a long time yet. I still can’t believe that the World Trade Center isn’t there any more, and it’s been a good 15 hours now since it’s been gone. It’s not just a part of the skyline: it’s a part of every New Yorker’s life. When you’re disoriented coming out of the subway, you just look for the World Trade Center, and you know that’s south.

Personally, I can’t think of any single deliberate event since Nagasaki in which so many people died. I don’t know whether today is going to change the course of history, but it certainly puts a final full stop to the glorious decade of peace dividends and bull markets that we had from 1990-2000. If this is the 21st century, I’m not sure I want to sign on.

What today has done, though, is remind me of the value of my friendships, and how good our life really is. To everyone I ought to have been in touch with more recently, to everyone whose phone call I never got around to returning, to everyone I should have spent more time with (which is everyone I know, really): I love you all. Maybe we need something unutterably bad to remind us of what is really important and good.

Posted by Felix at 1:25 EST