Going through 11-year-old e-mails . . .

I kept, in a folder -- never thinking, I'm sure, that e-mail would still be around in 11 years -- some correspondence among friends exchanged as Sept. 11, 2001 unfolded.  Yeats and Auden made multiple appearances, as did this one, in particular:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade;

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night

-
W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939.

That afternoon -- I'll never forget how amazed I was that it all came together so quickly, and smoothly -- about 6,000 members of the Notre Dame community celebrated Mass on the South Quad.

It's strange, for me, to remember what a beautiful day that awful day was.