Nine years ago, on Tuesday, September 11, I was settling myself into my cubicle at Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in Austin for another day's monotony. I was browsing the news websites when...

And I remembered how the twin towers were the first sight to greet my eyes every day from the lving room window of my 14th Street apartment in New York City,and the last sight every night, for 10 years. So absolute was their aspect of permanence that I adapted the old Roman expression "when the Colosseum falls, Rome will fall to "when the Towers fall, New York will fall." Well, they did, and she didn't. Such is human "permanence." (Of course, the Colosseum is still there.)