September 12, 2011 issue, completed August 6, 2012

Inevitably, this issue commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, with personal stories about where people were when they hit and how they were affected, as well as rather depressing essays on the state of America now, 10 years later. Maybe it's because I don't live in America, but I couldn't be bothered to read them - to someone looking in at the country from the outside, many of America's problems seem kind of obvious. Also, I found the whole commemoration of 9/11 lacking in its ability to re-create the feeling we all felt when it happened. I guess it was one of the first world disasters that I lived through and that impacted me the way world wars might have affected those in older generations. Though I was far from New York and watched it all unfold on TV, I will never forget that day. It was the day I learned what it meant to be so awed by something so great and terrible that you fall to your knees. You read about people falling on their knees in religious material, including the Bible, but in this jaded age, it takes a lot to actually make it happen. But it happened to me as I fell in front of the TV when I saw the South Tower fall. That night, a bunch of friends and I gathered in a bar (we could do that then, in our lives before children) and tried to make sense of what we had witnessed. The next morning, I cried. The feeling was a kind of mourning, a mourning for an innocence and openness and trust that our society had forever lost that day. Although time has diluted the feeling, it is still there, most notably when we fly, but really in any public situation. We wondered that night whether it was not selfish and cruel to bring children into a world like this. However, many times since I have said to myself, perhaps it is selfish and cruel not to, because if we do not create good future citizens to make the world a better place, the bad ones (and the mediocre ones) will make it a worse one.

There was a book review of "The Art of Fielding" by Chad Harbach which, in and of itself, would not have been notable or have piqued my interest about the book (it involves baseball, and I have not cared about baseball since the Blue Jays last won the World Series in 1993), were it not for a fascinating read I enjoyed in the October 2011 Vanity Fair. That article told the story of how that book came to be, from a broke young author who wrote it over 10 years to his getting an agent and eventually a publisher. The book review seemed to confirm the mania surrounding the release and the enthusiasm the VF story writer (a friend of Harbach's) has for the book. I'll be picking it up to read this fall. Part of my other, tangentially related, project to read more books.