September 11, 2002

A YEAR AGO today it was Tuesday, and I was awakened just before 7 a.m. by a shake of the shoulder and the comment that there was something on TV I had to see. Since this is a comment not often heard in our household, and since the comment was made with an urgency also not often heard in our household, I took my place in front of the cathode-ray tube, which – like most other cathode-ray tubes in our cathode-ray nation – glowed that morning, as it would for weeks and months to come, with the weird grays, whites, oranges, and blues, the fumes and plumes and flutterings, of the World Trade Center towers' death agonies.

I must have made coffee, squeezed juice, poured cereal, walked the dogs, and done everything else I had long done in the mornings. But I have no memory of doing any of it. All I remember is sitting in front of the television for hour after hour, and not going out to dinner that night.

We went out the following night, to Alma, which had just opened. The restaurant was surprisingly not empty. The atmosphere was surprisingly unweird, though I suspected then and am virtually certain now that the animated conversations at all the other tables were, like the conversation at our own table, about a world whose assumptions had irrevocably shifted. Did one feel safe in a public place? Not entirely, though the likelihood that al-Qaeda fanatics would blow up Alma seemed remote. Still, one's strongest impulse was to go home and bolt the door. We did that, only to open it the following morning on a year that seems now, in retrospect, tinged with unreality: the paradoxes of further terrorist atrocities that never occurred, despite dire warnings from the government, and of life returning to ordinary rhythms in a time that had become extraordinary.

These days I feel more than usually hostile to restaurants that strive to entertain instead of encourage conversation. We are an overentertained population, and our desire to sit there as slack-jawed witnesses to one sort of performance or other is not a benign cultural development. Entertainment implies passivity and distraction, and a distracted, passive population is one easily misled, or enslaved. We can be fairly certain that tyranny, if it ever does arrive on these shores, will appear not in the form of a shouting dictator with a pencil mustache but as some outsize version of the greatest show on earth.

And it may not arrive at all if we watch less and talk more – and if we bear in mind the ancient precept that food is better talked over than about.