I was home that day writing away, struggling with words, and they were not coming. A shiny and bright day it was. I kept on looking outside admiring the scene, grateful to the weather. I kept looking outside in search of ideas to put on paper. Again, nothing was coming. This restlessness continued for two hours. I remember not feeling well when I woke up. I was haunted by a bad dream, in which I was chased the whole night by something. I woke up with that dream. I always begin my day by reading my email, as I did that day. I read a mysterious letter from Harvard University’s president that expressed condolences to families, and comforted students about the horrible death of innocent lives. I must have been dreaming, for I could not fathom the meaning of the letter. So I casually moved on to read other letters. Business as usual.

The telephone rang and it was the voice of my distressed wife, who impatiently asked me if I have heard the news. I said no. She then informed me about the deaths in New York City.

I rushed to the TV. There it was. I remained glued to it from Sept 11th to Sept 17th.

Horror on the screen. A replay of jets that had just monstrously pierced the interiors of the towering buildings which housed the World Trade Center, the landmarks of high modernity, the apogee of technological prowess.

The massive explosion inside had just swallowed human bodies, with the wobbly steel bending and melting away, and the towers collapsing into rubble.

Bodies falling away in forms barely distinguishable from shattered concrete, and broken steel. In a far away corner, a lone photographer’s body appears and disappears, struggling to immortalize a historical moment, before it is extinguished in oblivion. I can see his face, sometimes looking at me the viewer in shock, and then I face his back, as he continues to witness the making of human history, another episode of shameful human action, another production of hate and grief. How ashamed I felt to be human. I wished I wasn’t.

Fireman running to the scene in record numbers, who soon became consumed by the inferno. Police rescuing trapped bodies, forcefully disengaging them from steel and concrete. All of a sudden I am witnessing a war zone,without combatants. The enemies and their victims consumed by fire and abused by steel.

Pilots, janitors, firefighters, cleaners and many others exploded inside the buildings. I imagined the horrors of their death, their last seconds on this cursed planet, their frightened faces looking at the face of God. My ears were deafened by their screams pleading with their killers. I asked myself why, why did this happen? Why do human beings have to die this way? Is it not enough that some of those who died have already been burdened by the weight of existence, by responsibility, duty, bills and unconsummated dreams and diseases?

Some of them woke up at early hour that day to make beds, to clean offices, to make money that day, like all other days.

I felt like saying Speak God, speak to me! The bills that they have to pay, the long hours they have to put to take care of their loved ones, the money that they have send to their relatives drenched in poverty in faraway places, the future that they had to secure for themselves and their children were not enough burden. They had to be punished with horrible ways of dying.

This should not have been, should not have been. Look how it ended. Now that they are dead, how should, we the living, remember them? Our immediate reaction is anger, the desire to revenge, if necessary in a disproportionate way. This is understandable. Indeed, it is the immediate language of anger, of grief. How could it be otherwise? Eye for an eye is the immediate feeling. Anger is indeed a rational reaction to injustice. In this sense, it is just to be angry. After the dust is settled, and this is bound to take the nation a longtime, we have to begin reflecting on why this happened. Most specifically, we must address the question of not only what did the “terorrists” want but also, what do those whom the terrorists represent want?

In a future piece, I will reflect on these and other aspects of this modern.