If you are sitting alone in your apartment, not watching (or don't have) a TV, and you feel an akward incongruity between the sunny clear blue-sky Saturday going on outside and the wailing grief of a nation, then spend some time with these photos.  Your tears will likely flow like rain, and your heart will be right back in alignment with all the rest of humanity. 

Tears do not darken our view of the world.  The white trim on the brick building next door is gleaming in today's bright sunlight.  Through tears, it absolutely sparkles. 

Something tells me this is sick, but I wish I was there.  Of course, if I was there, I would have wished I wasn't -- like the 5k who were there. 

5k.  A gross impersonalization but, as counterpoint, it emphasizes how utterly personal that attack was for every single one of those who died.  Out of all of those who suffered and died (estimates are that there will be more than 5,000, much more), at the end someone was just taking the first sip of their last coffee; someone was yawning; someone sighed for the tedium of their life at the instant it ended.  Out of 5,000 plus people who are now dead, someone saw it coming.  I wonder what they did.  Scream?  Furrow their brow quizzically at the 'impossible' spectre? 

I wonder what I -- what any of us -- will do now.

An account from a 1998 interview with Osama bin Laden. 

Where has all the time gone?  Just getting into bed now. 

I just don't want to be awake in the daylight today -- or yesterday.  And maybe not tomorrow.  I think I will call in sick tonight, If I don't sleep past noon...

This will become the 'Zapruder film' of the World Trade Center catastrophe. 

I know none of us ever thought a whole ton of things that we are thinking today, but I really never thought I'd hear the term 'forces of darkness' used outside of a fantasy novel, much less by a head of state. 

Words have not yet been invented to describe the way this agony has touched me, this nation, and the world. 

Hitler taught humankind a great deal about inhumanity, atrocity, and lust for power.  These were things we did not then want to learn -- lessons which we would gladly have forfeited had they not grabbed us and shaken us into an unpleasant reality.  Humanity paid dearly for that education.  But it was worth it. 

On Tuesday -- my birthday -- we began a new lesson, similar in its unpleasantness and difficulty to the one Hitler taught decades ago.  However, the topic of that lesson was over-grasping political philosophies while this lesson's theme is hateful religious fanaticism.  And like it or not, now is humanity's time to learn this particular lesson. 

The instructor, probably Osama bin Laden, has aroused in us an epic rage and fury.  Thus he offers us a test, with an opportunity to pass or fail: can we feel within our broken hearts the full breadth of our rage, and attend our agony wherever it takes us, even down to our most terrifying depths and back out again, without choosing to kill our souls with hatred? 

Whoever did this is a hate-filled person who has a chilling skill for turning others toward hate.  His substance is fear, his purpose is evil, and he hates every manifestation of the openness, optimism, dauntless hope, and kind generosity which are, in large part, constitutents of the American personality.  He seeks to kill that goodness in us -- not by murder, atrocity, or acts of war -- but by simply making us hate. 

I can't stop crying, and that is a good thing.  Because once I refuse to cry, I have no choice but to hate, and that bastard is not going to win.  Not in America. 

And definitely not on my birthday. 

Updated: 12:19 PM EDT 16:19 GMT -- 11 Sep 2001

stunned.

I'm glad summer is not over.  I'm glad my air conditioner still works.  For all my tantrums and bitterness, I am still grateful that all the world's people continue their precious journies despite my occasional desire that everyone except me be vaporized.  I am grateful for the work I am allowed to do -- even with all of its frustrations, catch-22's, and angry-scared-hurt people who call and try to be mean. 

I am thankful for consciousness; for sight; for the ability to read; for the opportunity to write; and for the paperback set, now venerable and disintegrating, given to me by my sister 30 years ago, 29 years before she died. 

I like woodsmoke carried on crisp air, or the scent of suntan lotion mingling with sweat and sea air on a brilliantly sunny beach-day.  I apreciate the performance art of day and night, of sunset and sunrise, of cloud and sky, and of star and spirit.  I love all my ex's and their vast capacities to forgive; few of them hate me, but most of them have had reason to.  I am grateful for all the trauma's I have suffered, for my abortive evasions of trauma's effect, for the decades I have lost to self-pity, self-contempt, and breathtaking rage.  And I am grateful to have lived long enough to grow up and to retract the blame that really belongs to no one. 

I have hated living only because I loved life more than I thought I could bear.  I am grateful now to know that my love for life is vast -- and exactly the equivalent of my capacity to bear it.