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Others have it worse, have had, will always ‘We,’ though, own the record now for largest building collapse   A double you could call it Work with it Live with it Others far away die (and live) with the daily probability of car bombs, bus bombs, persons exploding in the neighbourhood They experience bombs from the sky and the earth, and are exhausted and homeless, and watch their children wasted by hunger, maimed, lost; and can’t keep in touch with friends to get help, join forces, or mourn And can have scarcely a thought except for today’s survival Scarcely a thought period For example, that history is what hurts Thought must seem like a leisure activity for those whose survival is in doubt Like reading   And so, what is my experience worth, displaced from a lower Manhattan loft for three weeks by air quality and marginal restrictions and shock?   What use is my experience? What do I make of it, putting it together? A form it may take in what we make A half-recalled remark someone made about a very long sentence or two of mine   A memory bears me from inside myself perhaps an hour and a half beyond that first clear sight from the parking lot across the street from our old six-storey brick building eight blocks from the shining north tower of the World Trade Centre abstractly, palpably burning, and a few minutes later the south which from my angle with scarcely a sliver of space between the two seemed to catch fire from the north; and carries me beyond several things I did thereafter during an extended moment of unusual dimensions (a structure also of some outside and inside project encompassing me) such as shut my absent neighbours’ fourth- and fifth-floor wide-open windows that I’d noticed from where I stood at five minutes of nine across the street C thinking floors, height, sky, fire, distance, closeness, passengers, and a ‘thought’ that the plane, which I had not seen, was gone into that hole it had made (that I could see) shaped by subtraction – while with me in the