Tim Kreider is one of my favorite people alive. He's a cynical, misanthropic, tragically talented cartoonist who draws the most incredible facial expressions, and also happens to be an extraordinarily talented writer. He's one of the contributors to the NYTimes "Happy Days" blog, which I also highly recommend, and wrote this piece for the anniversary of 9/11:

‘You Are Alive’

I experienced 9/11 the same way almost all Americans did — on TV. And I reacted the same way a lot of them did — by going temporarily insane.

I like to think that most people who got caught up in that bellicose hysteria experienced the attacks as a spectatorial event, as unreal, and so their reaction was also unreal — like the “payback-time” montage in an action film or the impotent revenge scenarios we play out in our heads. It wasn’t until I actually went to New York City a week after the attacks that I understood how empty and inappropriate an emotion anger was to bring to the circumstances; it was like picking fights at a wake. New Yorkers, who had been so profoundly wounded, hadn’t given in to rage; what they were, mostly, was sad.

I hesitate to say this, but that was not only a ghastly time; it was also it was a beautiful time, in the same way that a friend’s funeral can be beautiful. New Yorkers seemed to have had their shells torn off, the gelid stuff of their inner selves exposed and flinching at the air. Jealously tended hierarchies temporarily evaporated, and the worthless currency of human decency reacquired street value. Strangers made eye contact and got too choked up to speak. I heard about a wave of tender and desperate spontaneous sex — it would be the opposite of the truth to call it “casual.” Graffiti appeared that actually spoke instead of just marking territory, like the overheard murmurs of a city talking to itself or fitfully dreaming. I saw a spray-painted message that would’ve seemed trite or sentimental a week before: YOU ARE ALIVE.

Sept. 11 came at the end of an idyllic but somehow flaccid decade when a half-century’s threat of mass immolation seemed suspended, and the single biggest news story in the U.S. was not Kosovo or Rwanda but an act of fellatio. Suddenly seeing the same people we sit in traffic or ride mass transit with dying horribly may have made some of us take leave of our reason, but it also restored things to a truer perspective. It reminded us, briefly, that life is real.

—Tim Kreider

Damn right.