OLD COUNTRY.(The Talk of the Town)

There's no knowing what place September 11th will occupy in our minds in another five or ten years, but the surprise just now is that so many of its persistent, recircling images are about age. How could it be, one still asks, that no Pentagon strategist or op-ed cogitator, at home with the kids on a weekend in the nineteen-nineties, ever noticed that tall, million-windowed downtown office buildings and a sky stuffed with tipping, X-winged planes are an endlessly inviting subject for a seven-year-old Crayola master, and that if the two themes accidentally overlapped somewhere on the page the kid needed only to add some orange, then purple and black and gray, to achieve a disaster? How is it that, in memory, those booted, hose-burdened firemen glancing back as they hurry toward their fatal tasks in the South Tower are always in their mid-twenties, while the terrified bystanders and survivors running toward us, minutes later, from out of a monstrous cloud wear the white makeup and ashen garments of a ghostly Kabuki ancestor? We already knew that history could age you and shake you up sometimes, but not this way: not like a pinscher with a rat.

Those of us in our eighties or late seventies can still remember when this was called a young country (it was said all the time in school) and, if we lived in New York, retain the vision of earlier iconic towers--the Empire State, the Chanin Building, the George Washington Bridge--going up, week by week, to prove the point. The ...