A little less than twenty-five years ago, I wrote (in a blogpost now lost to link-rot and the vagaries of long-gone weblog hosting services) that 9-11 slashed a deep abyss across our time. There was the ‘now’ with a smoking pile of rubble where a pair of shining steel towers used to stand in New York City, and looking back across that abyss there was that time ‘before’. Almost immediately after that shattering day when death arrived unannounced and wholesale on wings of fire, melting steel and crushing concrete, the time ‘before’ seemed unimaginably distant.

Thousands of people – workers and travelers headed from home on that lovely September morning. They headed to work at an office job in a tall city tower, caught an airline flight for business or a holiday, went on shift at the fire house or the police precinct station – but within the space of a couple of hours, everything changed. More than three thousand people died in the space of an hour or two, thousands more escaped death by a thin whisker, additional thousands more were scarred and traumatized by being within sight and hearing of the World Trade Center inferno – or who were kin and friends to the dead. All the remaining hours of that day – the rest of us watched. And went on watching. I read somewhere that the fire in the rubble didn’t entirely go out until well into December of that year. In the days and months after that lovely, cool and clear autumn day, we heard so many stories – of police and firemen rushing without hesitation into the Towers, unflinchingly doing their job, of ordinary workers who calmed panic among their coworkers, helped their friends and fellows escape, carried out the injured, or stayed with them to the end because they pushed their own chances of getting away beyond possibility, of airline passengers and cabin crew who calmly made last affectionate calls to family and then rushed the Islamic hijackers with what they had in their bare hands

At the time – and even within a few moments of the first airliner striking the tower – commenters online were likening it to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. (I was online that morning, as all our clients cancelled for the day, and there was not much else to do in the office where I worked then.) A surprise attack by an enemy, in a place and at a time only the extremely paranoid and/or farsighted were expecting any such thing – but now I think that a before-and-after comparison to World War I is more like it.

When Pearl Harbor happened, there had already been a war going on in Europe for two years, in the Far East for even longer; there were already fears and acceptance of the inevitability that the USA would be involved, sooner or later. Yes, the US went onto a war footing and a lot of things changed in unexpected ways, but looking back from the perspective of someone born in the mid-1950s, I don’t get the sense of the world shattering, and being remade in unimaginable ways, as it was over the years 1914-1918; that in the eyes of whose who remembered the ‘before’ everything became coarser, louder, uglier and more depressing after the war, gashed and scarred on the shards of broken empires and shattered optimism about human progress.

There was a before … and there is an after. But it has been a quarter of a century since, and for those who were babies or small children, or not even born – all they know now is the ‘after’. They do not really grasp why (and honestly, one can’t really expect them to do so, unless they are preternaturally empathetic) that brief flash of the two tall silver towers in the background of certain movies or a television show stabs almost like a physical and painful jab for those older who clearly remember the ‘before’.