Honoring the Victims
James Carroll
TruthOut.org
Tuesday 09 September 2003

Sept. 11 will live in the American memory. But as what? ''Memory,'' the novelist Paul Auster says, is ''the space in which a thing happens for the second time.'

THE COINCIDENCE of dates is precious to human beings because it creates the impression that underlying the chaos of normality is a structure of order. The passage of time is not a mere matter of chance, and even things that seem unrelated are tied together, if not by links of causality, by meaning. In casting an eye back across the terrain of the past, a human being with a feeling for history looks for the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate events that will illuminate the hidden connection that alone explains their full significance.

more>>