Remember the black cover of the New Yorker that came out the week after 9/11 (it is dated September 24, 2001).

That cover, titled 9/11/01, by Art Spigelman was so moving. I hold it in my hand as I write this. If you hold it to the light you can see the after image of two towers.

I am so glad to have this issue in my collection of 9/11 books on the bookshelf in the dining room. So grateful to have saved this piece of New York history and by extension my history; I remember reading it on the day it arrived in our mailbox.

As I leaf through the magazine, I find it hard to believe there was even a "Goings On About Town" section. There were theater openings, movies, opera, art exhibitions, and other events. How was that possible? Did anyone go? Did life really "move on" so quickly.

As I remember it, we stood still for months afterward—frozen in fear, grief and incredulity. But the truth is we did do things. The kids went to school. We attended a Yom Kippur service in a Ft. Greene Church. Mostly we huddled together with our family and friends.

I am looking now at the miraculous Talk of the Town section, where a collection of writers (Hertzberg, Updike, Frantzen, Johnson, Angell, Appelfield, Rebecca Mead, Sontag, Antrim) wrote  hurried, dazed reactions to the events.

What could anyone really say? And yet there was so much to say.

John Updike wrote: "

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness. From the viewpoint of a tenth-floor apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where I happened to be visiting, the destruction of the twin towers had the false intimacy of televison, on a day of perfect reception.

Susan’s Sontag’s sharp words were painful to read on that week. We were tender,  vulnerable in a way we’d never known (our city, our country, ourselves) Nearly 3000 of our fellow New Yorkers were dead and the city was hurting deeply. I knew there was truth to what she had to say but it pierced, it hurt along with everything else. Yet, her insight and intelligence were a vital part of that week, too.

"The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV comentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantalize the public. Where is the acknowlegement that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or liberty or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed super power, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? "

Adam Gopik wrote;

"On the beautiful morning of the day they did it, the city was as beautiful as it had ever been. Central Park had never seemed so gleaming and luxuriant—the leaves just beginning to fall, and the light on the leaves left on the trees somehow making them at once golden and bright green…

"Our Lady of the Suways, New York as it is. It is the symbolic city that draws us here, and the real city that keeps us here. It seems hard but important to believe that that city will go on, because we now know what it would be like to lose it, and it feels like losing life itself."

For the fifth Anniversary issue, dated Monday September 11, 2006, there is a white cover with a tightrope figure (it is, of course, Phillipe Petit, who walked from one tower to the other in the late 1970’s) walking across a white landscape.

There is also, for the first time ever, another cover underneath the white one. The under-cover shows the tightrope figure walking on an invisible rope above lower Manhattan. We see the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges and many buildings. But on the ground there are the footprint of the missing World Trade Center.

Side by side, the 2001 and the 2006 covers tell a story. I don’t know what it is. And that’s okay.