I’ve been obsessed lately by thoughts that I had put to rest a while ago. At least I thought that I’d put them to rest. But, it’s a funny thing about bad memories; they keep hammering at the door of consciousness and won’t go away.

I consider the site of the former World Trade Center in New York to be sacred ground. There are souls that will be there until the earth has been consumed by the sun. Everyone who was vaporised, everyone who leapt rather than face the horror behind them, everyone who stood and died: they’re all there. They came down with the towers.

The mangled steel and broken concrete can be taken away, but the souls of those who died there can’t be moved. You could scrub ground zero down to the bedrock and the souls of those people will still be there. It hits me every time I look at that gaping wound that will never heal.

Oh, we can build over it. We can erect 1000s of square feet of rentable space. We can build a memorial. We can give all the fine speeches and wave our flags and vow, “never again!” But, when the bands have stopped playing, and the dais is deserted, and the last scrap of paper of the last speech has blown away; those souls will still be there.

When it has become nothing more than a catchphrase to future generations who didn’t witness it, even if we who did witness it think that we’ve put it neatly away in a manageable corner of our minds; it will come hammering at that door. No building, no capital expenditures, no smiles or promises can put those souls to rest.

Each person who died that day had a story. Each person who died that day had link to us. We are them and they are us. I cannot go by the Trade Center without stopping, and looking, and weeping. If there is nothing I can do but remember, then remember I must.

Please give what you can to Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders).

And, of course

*Of the many men whom I am, whom we are,
I cannot settle on a single one.
They are lost to me under the cover of clothing
They have departed for another city.

When everything seems to be set
to show me off as a man of intelligence,
the fool I keep concealed on my person
takes over my talk and occupies my mouth.

On other occasions, I am dozing in the midst
of people of some distinction,
and when I summon my courageous self,
a coward completely unknown to me
swaddles my poor skeleton
in a thousand tiny reservations.

When a stately home bursts into flames,
instead of the fireman I summon,
an arsonist bursts on the scene,
and he is I. There is nothing I can do.
What must I do to distinguish myself?
How can I put myself together?

All the books I read
lionize dazzling hero figures,
brimming with self-assurance.
I die with envy of them;
and, in films where bullets fly on the wind,
I am left in envy of the cowboys,
left admiring even the horses.

But when I call upon my dashing being,
out comes the same old lazy self,
and so I never know just who I am,
nor how many I am, nor who we will be being.
I would like to be able to touch a bell
and call up my real self, the truly me,
because if I really need my proper self,
I must not allow myself to disappear.

While I am writing, I am far away;
and when I come back, I have already left.
I should like to see if the same thing happens
to other people as it does to me,
to see if as many people are as I am,
and if they seem the same way to themselves.
When this problem has been thoroughly explored,
I am going to school myself so well in things
that, when I try to explain my problems,
I shall speak, not of self, but of geography.

-Pablo Neruda