Six Years Later

It's September 11th, six years later... and in many ways it feels like the world we've lived in for six years now is normal. And I guess it is. A new kind of normal. At the time many said things would never be the same again, and I guess they aren't. Six years doesn't seem like much of a marker, really. A plain, ordinary number. Not like ten or twenty-five. Yet I suppose the day, September 11th, will always dawn for us under a shadow.

In the days, weeks and months following September 11th, I began to imagine how the events of that day would figure into the literature of the future, much like other enormously catastrophic events of our history have of their representative eras. I haven't seen a lot of that yet, but some of the greatest writers and photographers of our time contribute regularly to the New York Times which annually compiles the best of their talent largess for its 9/11 reflection. It's worth tapping into, even if you have to sign up (it's free).

The art above (by John Mavroudis & Owen Smith) is poached from one of my favourite New Yorker covers of all time. It's from the September 2006 edition, and depicts Philippe Petit's famous tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974 in the ghostly absence of the towers which made the feat so spectacular.