An incredible poetic essay from David Warren about the awakening many people experienced after 9/11: Fragility exposed. This could be the manifesto for LGF, and I suspect for many other anti-idiotarian weblogs.

But on the morning of Sept. 11th, we, so many of us, began to come awake. Awake as if we had previously been sleeping; awake and suddenly alive to realities that had been concealed. And perhaps awakened in time to save us.

It was not mere horror aroused by what we saw, nor the outrage, nor any desire for revenge. These things were certainly present, as natural emotional reactions; but they were only the momentary things. There was something in the experience that went beyond them.

It was like the “call of the distant bugler”; the call to rise out of ourselves, to find something useful, and do it. The call even to prayer as a most useful act, and to the life and labour that are its buttress.

Not everybody heard it, but so many did. And some who did not hear at first, began to hear it later. For some, at a great distance, it takes time for the signal to carry on the wind; for others there is the raw phenomenon of denial. (“Why should this event influence my life, neither I nor anyone I know was injured.”)

For it was not a dismissible disaster, an earthquake or a volcano, it was an event loaded with meaning. To my mind, it was impossible to contemplate what had happened, without hearing the angel singing in the ashes.