Trích tản văn của Belle Waring viết năm ngoái nhân kỷ niệm ngày 11 tháng 9. Rất hay!
I have looked at that picture of Osama Bin Laden many times. He doesn’t look quite right, I mean, not as I would want him to look. Not angry enough. Khomeini was a very satisfactory villian for the American public. Bin Laden? He looks thoughtful. Inward-gazing. I try to imagine thoughts to put there, behind his too-soft eyes. I put my imaginary desert landscapes there: life reduced to its essentials, a single man trudging along the horizon under a bowl of infinite blue. Is this what he wants? The whole world pared down, all taking the same journey into desert as Arabia Felix did, that was once so green? Nothing extraneous, nothing human? Nothing female, certainly. On Cyprus they used to worship Aphrodite in an aniconic form: a cone of volcanic rock, five feet high. You can see it there, in a museum. Even that would be too much for him.
Last year I went to New York for the first time since September 11, 2001. Driving over the 59th Street bridge I looked back at the curiously balanced skyline. It used to be massively weighted at the tip, anchored by those vertical marks. Now it just floated there, behind the car, the buildings of the east side lowering behind the tombstones of that massive graveyard in Queens, serried rank upon rank, until I could see them no more.