Anti-Climacus

Megan McArdle has some interesting reflections on the anniversary of 9/11:

I was going to write a long piece on what it was like to work at Ground Zero in the days immediately after the attacks. Perhaps someday I'll write that piece, but every time I started it this weekend, it felt false. What I wanted to write about was emptiness and silence. And what do you write about those things? Better writers than I have struggled with the impossibility of directly expressing an absence. The towers were there, hovering over every move you made downtown, and then they were not, but when they collapsed they left no impression behind them. There was just the sky, looking like the sky.

The shock, for New Yorkers was not just that they were gone, but how quickly we acclimated to the fact that they were gone. It wasn't like losing a tooth--there was no visual cue that something was missing. Your brain might remember that something was supposed to be there, but your eyes quickly forgot.

I don't really have much to say about it, or any extended reflections on how I've changed because of it (and not, as is more likely, as a result of having been 19 then and 29 now), so that's all I'll say about it.