A birthday that will live in infamy

For one thing, terror, like torture, affects its targets not only on the surface but underneath, in ways that even those who suffer its effects can only dimly articulate, if they are aware of its effect at all. The danger is that in giving so much consideration to the event, each of us unwittingly feathers a warm nest in which the memes of insidious fear can be incubated and hatched. We become hosts.

For instance, when playing tennis recently, I felt a sudden sharp pain in my calf. I was limping for days. One morning shortly afterward, limping into my car, settling into the driver's seat, I slammed the door on the tip of my finger. I didn't break the bone, but it scared me, because I thought: Cripes, I'm falling apart! Look what those terrorists have done!

They'd gotten me off my game just like a tennis opponent who keeps surprising you with spin and unexpected shots, keeping you out of rhythm, wearing you down until surrender begins to look like an attractive way to end the torment of long, fruitless battle. Those terrorists are really messing with me, I thought.

Of course, to make oneself the focus of the world's capricious malevolence is the error of a child, or a paranoiac. To wonder even for an instant, "Why is all this happening to me? What does it mean?" is to become distracted from the task of understanding the real threat and doing what's realistic. In this way, the quest for meaning and the quest for survival can find themselves at odds in the human heart.

So to guard against self-doubt and fear requires more than what can be achieved by baggage screeners and counterintelligence. It requires a kind of emotional baggage screening, to prevent us from crippling ourselves before we realize what we're doing, before we just stop going outside and don't know why.

It's not as though it's a simple matter to come to a conclusion about the meaning of the events. In fact, what is most disturbing is the possibility that the attacks of Sept. 11 are only the opening chords of a complicated, challenging piece of diabolical music whose patterns, much as we seek to find order in them, may forever resist us. The game being played against the West is not designed to be understood, but to destroy us.

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Sometimes after a birthday celebration, when we kids had eaten too much cake and had been inside too long, we would wander to the woods, or a field, and find an anthill, and poke it with a stick. Unlike bees, against whose sting a keeper will devise elaborate protections, the ants had nothing we wanted. We just liked to stir them up, just because we could.

But if in our fascination we stared too long, if our minds drifted too far off in the hot and humid September air, a sudden sting on the back of the thigh would bring a shiver of panic; we'd freeze in terror and then run, covered in ants, screaming, crying, realizing that we'd been standing in the ant pile all along.

Our stunned amazement after the Sept. 11 attacks has some of that quality in it as well, as if after a long period of drunkenness, not by wine, by poetry or by virtue but by power, that cognac of geopolitics, we came to consciousness like the drunk on a bender who took a taxi out of Manhattan and woke up on a traffic island ... in Jerusalem.

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There were two reasons why I wanted an Adirondack chair for my birthday. I wanted to relax on the back deck, and I wanted to commune with a symbol. The Adirondack chair was a symbol of childhood visits to my grandmother's house, of long afternoons on a lawn, drinking iced tea, playing croquet and listening to adults talk of mysterious things. It also stood for a certain solid East Coast ease that I knew I would never attain, but which attracts me. After all, I come from Florida, land of escapes: to which the worst of the North have escaped and from which the worst of the South never will. Aside from wanting it as a symbol, I also wanted the Adirondack chair as a practical device for achieving a state of easy relaxation. It was not meant as a vehicle for deep meditation, but for simply a pleasant obliviousness of the type that is easy to indulge in when things are good.

And things were good; even with the downturn in the tech economy before Sept. 11, life was more comfortable and more secure than it had ever been. As a writer, I had always been prepared to be dirt poor. The economic boom had removed the threat of dire poverty, and my Internet job had let me make a decent living doing what I enjoy. I knew that even if I lost my job, I would still be a lucky man, owner of a house in San Francisco, possessor of relevant skills, not about to starve or face eviction. And miraculously, I had weathered heartbreaking layoffs but was still employed, still enjoying my work, still able to plan for the future.

Next Page: Perhaps we are finally ready to live in history like everyone else

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