It had been fairly securely bound but then it got loose, and all we know about this is that the same thing unleashed it that had secured it before, and that is all, it would be the height of folly to state, to represent, to categorically designate the power, that is to say specifically this unleashing of power, that immeasurably vast, baffling system that is truly immeasurable, truly baffling, in other words: the for us forever incomprehensible workings of the ineluctable modality of chance, in which we have sought and found laws, yet in fact over the heroic centuries of the past we have never got to know it, just as we can be certain that we shall not get to know it in times to come, for all we have ever been able, are able, and will ever be able to know are the consequences of ineluctable chance, those terrifying moments when the whip cracks, it cracks and comes down on our backs just as the whip cracks over this fortuitous universe we call the world, and unleashes what had been securely bound, that is when—namely now—it is once again unleashed upon the world, the thing that we humans forever and repeatedly insist on calling the new, the unprecedented, even though it surely cannot be called new or unprecedented, after all it has been here ever since the creation of the world, or to put it more accurately, it arrived simultaneously with us, or still more accurately, by way of us, and always like this, so that we were and are only able to recognize its arrival after the fact, retrospectively; it is already here by the time we realize that it has arrived again, always finding us unprepared, even though we ought to be aware that it is coming, that it is secured only temporarily, we ought to hear its chains scraping, loosening, the hiss of knots coming undone in the until then tight cordage, deep down inside us we ought to know that it is about to break loose, and that is how it should have been this time too, we should have known that this is how it would be, that it was bound to come, but we only awoke to the realization, if we awoke at all, that it was here already, and that we were in trouble, we ascertained that we were helpless, by which we only meant that we always were so, for we are forever helpless—when it is here—helpless and defenseless, and to think about this precisely during the first hours after the attack proved so uncomfortable that instead we began to worry about finding out what had happened, how it had happened, who they were and why they did it, to worry about the collapse of the Twin Towers and the caving in of the Pentagon, how this had happened, how they collapsed and caved in, and who the perpetrators were, and how they did it, whereas what we first of all should have been, and by now certainly must be, worrying about and realizing at long last: what has actually happened cannot be comprehended, which by the way is no wonder, since the arrival of the one, of what had till now been fairly well contained but had now somehow broken loose, without exception always signals that we have entered a new era, it signals the end of the old, and the beginning of the new, and nobody had “consulted us” about this, no, we hadn’t even noticed when all this had been happening, the words “turning point” and “dawn of a new era” were hardly out of our mouths when precisely this critical, time-bound nature of a turning point and a dawn was rendered ludicrous as we realized that all of a sudden we were living in a new world, had entered a radically new era, and we understood none of it, because everything we had was obsolete, including our conditioned reflexes, our attempts to understand the nature of a process, how “all of this” had “consequently” proceeded from there to here, everything was as obsolete as our conviction to rely on experience, on sober rationality, to lean on them as we investigated causes and evidence that this had truly happened to us, the nonexistent or for us inaccessible causes and evidence, now that we found ourselves indeed in a brand-new era, in other words here we stand, every last one of us as of old, blinking and peering around in the same old way, our aggressiveness betraying old uncertainties, a fatuous aggressiveness at a time when we haven’t even begun to be afraid yet, still insisting on the lie, that no, no way was this a radical change in our world, no way was this the end of one world epoch and the beginning of a new, every last one of us obsolete, myself possibly one of the most obsolete of all, now feeling a long-absent sense of community with others, very obsolete, indeed speechless in the deepest possible sense of the word, because on September 11 I flashed on the fact, like a twinge of physical pain, that, good god, my language, the one I could use to speak out now, was so old, so godforsaken ancient, the way I strung it out, quibbling, twisting and turning, pushing and pulling it to move ahead, pestering it, advancing by stringing one ancient word after another, how useless, how helpless and crude this language is, this language of mine, and how splendid it had been formerly, how dazzling and supple and apt and deeply moving, but by now it has utterly lost all of its meaning, power, spaciousness, and precision, all gone, and then for days I pondered this, would I ever be able, would I ever be capable of suddenly learning some other language without which it would be completely hopeless; I knew at once, watching the flaming, tumbling Towers, and then envisioning them again and again, and I knew that without a brand-new language it was impossible to understand this brand-new era in which, along with everyone else, I suddenly found myself; I brooded and pondered, tormented myself for days on end, after which I had to admit that no, I had no chance of suddenly learning a new language, I was, along with the others, too much a prisoner of the old, and there was no recourse, I concluded, but to abandon all hope of ever understanding what was going on down here, so I sat in profound gloom, staring out the window, as again and again those giant Twin Towers kept falling and falling and falling, I sat there staring, and using these old words I began to describe what I saw, together with the others, in this new world, I began to write down what I felt, that I was unable to comprehend, and the old sun began to set in the old world, darkness began to fall in the old way in my old room as I sat by the window, when suddenly some horrendous fear began to slowly creep over me, I don’t know where it came from, I merely felt it growing, this fear that for a while did not reveal what it was, only that it existed and was growing, and I just sat there utterly helpless, watching this fear growing in me, and I waited, maybe after a while I would guess the nature of this fear, but that wasn’t what happened, not at all, this fear, while continually growing, did not reveal anything about itself, it refused to reveal its contents, so that understandably it began to make me anxious about what to do next, I could not keep on sitting here forever with this fear that concealed its contents, but I still sat there, numb, by the window, as outside those two Towers kept falling and falling and falling, when suddenly my ears registered a grating noise, as if cumbersome chains were clattering in the distance, and my ears registered a slight scraping sound, as if securely knotted ropes were slowly slipping loose—all I could hear was this grating clatter and this scary scraping, and once more I thought of my ancient language, and of the utter silence into which I had tumbled, I sat there staring at the outside and as complete darkness filled the room only one thing was completely certain: it had broken loose, it was closing in, it was already here.