It started on Tuesday or Wednesday. I was taking the subway into the City and as the train emerged onto the Manhattan Bridge and I looked across at the Financial District skyline set against a vivid blue sky, I immediately thought of September 11. I was in Leeds, England, in 2001. And one of my clearest memories of watching events unfold on television that day is of the two towers set against a clear, blue sky, spewing forth ash and smoke like factory chimneys.

This September 11 seems to have been overshadowed by Hurricane Katrina. And of course, four years on, it is already starting to seem more like a memory than a recent event. At the gym yesterday morning the television screens broadcast silent coverage of the memorial services but most people seemed more interested in sport on ESPN or on staring out of the window.

That’s not to say that New York wasn’t full of reminders of September 11 yesterday. We went for a walk along the boardwalk at Brighton Beach and someone had erected a makeshift memorial outside a restaurant with candles and a message of solidarity. Meanwhile, the New York Times carried recollections and consequences of the event from different perspectives. I have added a few interesting links. One piece of note is the Times Magazine’s Taking Stock of the Forever War, a well argued and depressing analysis of the War on Terror. You may want to print it out and read it later:

Sold a war made urgent by the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a dangerous dictator, Americans now see their sons and daughters fighting and dying in a war whose rationale has been lost even as its ending has receded into the indefinite future. A war promised to bring forth the Iraqi people bearing flowers and sweets in exchange for the beneficent gift of democracy has brought instead a kind of relentless terror that seems inexplicable and unending. A war that had a clear purpose and a certain end has now lost its reason and its finish. Americans find themselves fighting and dying in a kind of existential desert of the present. For Americans, the war has lost its narrative.

Links (these pieces will disappear behind a paywall in one week):
The Forever War (New York Times Magazine)
A Village of their Own Daniel Pearl’s widow on moving to the West Village to live among widows of 9/11. (New York Times, City section)
The Bridge and the Beyond A short piece about crossing the Manhattan Bridge on a subway train and looking at the space where the towers once stood. (New York Times, City section)
The Enduring Salute About the missing persons bulletin board at St Vincent’s Hospital (New York Times, City section)