ABSTRACT
I live in New York. For me it is impossible to get outside this subject, since I was inside the event-speaking relatively, of course. The World Trade Center’s towers fell about fifty blocks from my office and home. To stand in Washington Square Park that day and watch the towers burn was to feel yourself being changed by a public event. In that perverse way intellectuals have, I remember thinking about the later consequences for my own thinking. “If I see fighter planes overhead, I’ll have to undo everything I know about.” Twenty minutes later, the F-15s came.
