I was browsing through the Newseum website just now—they have an ongoing exhibit of front pages from newspapers around the world—and I was reminded that on Sept. 12, 2001, I bought a copy of the Washington Post and saved it. To this day, I haven’t even opened or read it. It’s not so much that I can’t deal with the emotional aspect of it, though that sentiment surely lingers—even looking at the front page on the screen is jarring, as perhaps it should always be—but now the paper has become for me a kind of time capsule. It’s as if I’m leaving it alone to age, to recede into memory, but with the inkling that I’ll rediscover it by chance in the future.
If you’ll permit me another, related thought: there’s something about the lowering of the flag that really affects me. I think it’s the symbolism, the grand sense of “national” mourning that gets to me. Yesterday morning I watched some of the TV news before I left the apartment, and filed away whatever thoughts I had at the time. But I felt a resurgence of emotion as I followed my usual route up Massachusetts Ave. to find all the embassy and other flags at half-staff. It’s a moving sight, I think. And when I arrived at my office, I looked out my window just as the huge flags at the bank building down the street were being lowered. I couldn’t help but stand and take a moment.
I kept my copy of the NY Times, and the NYer. I carried them to Australia, too, although I even forgot I had them until we were unpacking. I couldn’t bring myself to open them, but I thought a bit about the other periodicals that have been preserved in my family over the years: the Times when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. That’s it. A fairly remarkable pairing: the greatest achievement of the modern age and a horrific atrocity. What a world.