This was what it was always really about. We were beginning to grasp the human cost. Each individual death is an explosion in itself, wrecking the lives of those nearest. By Thursday I noticed among friends, and in TV and radio commentaries, a new mood of exhaustion and despair.

The reckoning, of course, was with the personal. We knew there was a greater reckoning ahead, but we could not quite feel it yet. We babbled, by email, on the phone, around kitchen tables. In our delirium, most of us wanted to talk. Even on Wednesday, fresh video footage froze us in this stupefied condition, and denied us our profounder feelings: the first plane disappearing into the side of the tower as cleanly as a posted letter the couple jumping into the void, hand in hand a solitary figure falling with a strangely extended arm (was it an umbrella serving as a hopeful parachute?) the rescue workers crawling about at the foot of a vast mountain of rubble. Initially, the visual impact of the scenes - those towers collapsing with malign majesty - extended our state of fevered astonishment.

Emotions have their narrative after the shock we move inevitably to the grief, and the sense that we are doing it more or less together is one tiny scrap of consolation.

Oblivion heart of the dead