Eleven

By David Simmons

We all make history in our own way, but it is mostly irrelevant to all but a negligible few. Most often, we at best live on its periphery, or observe it from afar.

This is just as well, for historic events are almost by definition hugely dangerous, sometimes fatal. The closer we get to them, the more we are reminded of life's fleeting nature, and hence its preciousness.

This weekend, of course, we are all thinking about where we were when the Towers came down. Like the Kennedy assassination, it is one of the few historic events that etch themselves on our personal – rather than our much vaguer, general – memories. The sight of the second plane banking gracefully through the jewel-like blue sky into the South Tower and erupting into a grotesque fireball was a horror rarely matched in intensity, and we hated ourselves for our inability to tear our eyes away from the reruns obligingly rerun on television over and over again.

But it is the peripheral nature of our observation of history that is perhaps more interesting than the events themselves, for our brushes with cataclysmic events are what illustrate the tenuousness of our existence, if for no other reason than that they are so much more survivable.

Over the decades, I've had many such brushes, including with the World Trade Center itself, which I once stood on top of (an obligatory part of any visit to the Big Apple back then), as well as brushing the ash of Mount St Helens off my motorbike, landing in Athens just after an earthquake, riding in the back of a Sandinista army truck through mountains infested with Contra terrorists, getting swept off my feet by the great Indian Ocean tsunami, and now, riding in Bangkok taxis nearly every day. Such a dangerous world: how is it that we survive it for more than a few minutes, let alone our "allotted" three score and ten?

It's a mystery, a miracle perhaps. Yet that's the definition of life itself.