For the past couple of days I have been listening almost non-stop to NPR’s coverage of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on my computer through streaming audio from the KQED website. I’ve listened as people have poured out their pain, as denials were proferred by various groups, as politicians have postured, as nations and peoples around the world have condemned the attack and offered their support to the United States and its peoples. I have kept a separate browser window at all times to follow the news on CNN and MSNBC. Finally, at about 2:00 this afternoon, I shut down Real Player and launched Spinner to listen to some Celtic music. Enough was enough. I didn’t want anymore. I wanted to shut out the world and focus on my work and not think about it anymore.

Of course, that isn’t possible. For the past two days at work, things have been quiet and subdued. At the meetings I’ve been to yesterday and today, the other developers and the managers have been subdued and quiet. Almost everyone has kept a window open to CNN or MSNBC or ABCNews. Of course we get work done. The software gets written, the pages get built, the servers get upgraded, the sales team gets their sales. My co-workers are almost always fairly light-hearted, and even sarcastic to the point of obnoxiousness, but that has changed this week.

Last night, Jennifer and I watched Chicken Run, an inane little movie which we both enjoyed. I was grateful when Jennifer suggested renting it, because I’d been needing to get my mind off of the news. But immediately after the movie was over, we both went upstairs to the office to check our e-mail and see what was new in the world.

This afternoon, after spending twenty minutes on a minor graphics project, I went back to CNN and loaded again the video of the second plane being flown right into the second World Trade Center tower. Big mistake; the horror and the surrealism of the entire situation came flooding back in a huge wave.

I think we’re all still getting used to the idea that this is real. It’s not a movie. It’s not a scene from a television show. It’s not fiction, God help us, it’s real. The screams in the background of that video are more haunting and frightening because of that.

Did any of us in our worst imaginings think that something like this would happen? Well, okay, of course novelists like Stephen King and Tom Clancy have imagined stories of the Apocalypse, the world ending in nuclear war or plague, and maybe there have been political or science fiction thrillers which have started with lines like, "It all began on the day of the bombings."

But who knows if any of that ever really prepared us for the reality of what has happened? We’ve been told time and again that there were no contingency plans for an attack of this magnitude, that none of the scenarios imagined by our defense department included such despicably inhuman acts as were demonstrated on Tuesday morning.

I’ve seen some terrible things said and heard of terrible things done over the past few days. People attacking Arab Americans because of their race. Hate mails strewn about the web. Calls for immediate nuclear attacks on Afghanistan. I’m disturbed by e-mails claiming that all Arab Americans are culpable, and frighened by talk of war against an indeterminate enemy.

And what I can’t help but think about every time I see those videos is those telephone calls. The unthinkable calls made at the last minute to husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters. I can’t imagine having to make such a call, and I can’t imagine ever receiving such a call from Jennifer; or, worse, stepping away from my desk one morning which seems like any other morning, and coming back to my desk to find my voice mail light flashing. What must it be like, to know you are going to die soon, to be given the opportunity to say goodbye to those you love and finding that they aren’t available? Or to come back and find that you’ve missed that last opportunity to hear the voice of someone that you cherish and know that you will never see them or hear from them again? I don’t want to think about how the people who had to make those calls must have felt, and I don’t want to think about how it must have felt to take such a call.

The grief we all feel is profound; the grief of those who have lost loved ones, in the planes or in the towers, is beyond imagining.

There have been calls for international unity, there have been offers of aid and support from nations normally hostile to us, there have been thousands upon thousands of people lined up for hours to give blood to help those injured in the attacks, thousands of volunteers helping out, millions of dollars donated to the Red Cross, the United Way, the Salvation Army and other organizations. And there have been the spontaneous expressions of grief and unity and sympathy from all over the world. While they are encouraging and helpful, those who are lost will never return. A destructive war against those who we think might be responsible won’t bring back the lives that have been lost.

So I listen to the beautiful Celtic songs, I read about scientific discoveries being made and about how humanity goes on and about how we struggle to make sense of this tragedy, and express to those directly affected that we share their grief.

And I think about the words spoken by an alien intelligence to Ellie Arroway in the movie Contact, about how puzzling humanity is: "You’re capable of such beautiful dreams… and such terrible nightmares."