Our unfinished work is not merely to defeat the barbarians, but to build up a civilization against which not only their malice will crumble, but which will outshine them to nothingness
Looking back at 9/11 through the tunnel of years, like watching the painfully blue light of the memorial towers of light sweep the sky, is both remote and vast. Looking back through time is like looking at a mountain or the sky. At a skyscraper or thousands of graves. A vastness beyond meaning.
"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here," Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address. It was not that way at Gettysburg, but it has been that way at Ground Zero. All the words fall away and we are left only with the shock and the horror.
The hole in the world.