I sit to write this at 12:54, Tuesday 11 September 2001. The most important and mind-destroying American historical event of my lifetime - of the lives of the generations born after World War 2 - took place about four hours ago.

Twenty-four hours before the attack I was teaching a class. I came home, puttered in my garden for awhile. My mind was occupied by tomatoes, changing the baby's diaper, Monday Night Football. That's my life; but now none of it seems real.

What's real to us now is only the impossible sight of a plane flying into the World Trade Center, of the building collapsing, of smoke and dust covering lower Manhattan. It is inconceivable that someone flew a passenger jet into the Pentagon, but there it is, a massive hole, live on television.

My wife said she thought it was a bad dream - that she'd wake up and it wouldn't be real. But to me nothing seemed real except the attacks. The television was real; my life was false.

My family scrambled, as yours probably did, to locate everyone. When the smoke clears, so many of us will have lost people we loved, in New York, in airplanes, in Virginia. The national mourning will go on for weeks.

And we will never be the same, because we will feel intensely vulnerable, and because the response will be an extreme tightening of security measures, almost everywhere, almost all the time. After this, we will be less free. We will think of our lives in bifurcation: before and after.

As I write, we don't know who did this, and Oklahoma City ought to have taught us not to assume that Islamic terrorists are the only serious threat.

But we need to be aware of how people around the world see the United States. To much of the world, we are rich, we are powerful, we are arrogant, we are decadent, we are the oppressors. The Rastafarians talk about "Babylon," and they mean New York; they mean Washington.

But even the oppressor is human. People, real people, with children at home, thousands of them - of us - went to work every day at the World Trade Center. People who pray to God. People who love and are loved. People who are "oppressors" only because they happened to be where they were.

The World Trade Center was a symbol. It was a symbol because it had been attacked in 1993 without being brought down. It was a symbol because it was built on such a huge scale. It was a symbol because it was a center of the "globalization," which to many people around the world means American dominance of world economies.

But the people who died were not symbols. Nor were they for the most part soldiers, or even policy-makers. They were just ordinary folks trying to make a living, take care of their families, get home for dinner.

I don't know whether we are at war, because I don't know who we are at war with. We had better pause before we are killing noncombatants too. But punishment is warranted; vengeance is warranted; killing, if the military can really figure out who deserves death, is warranted.

But that's not our job. Our job is to mourn, to explain this in whatever way we can to our children and to one another, to stop our lives for a moment and think and feel.

We had better hold on to each other. We need to let this teach us again, we who remain, how to love.