【勝手に引用】
"The Things They Left Behind" Like almost everyone else in America, I was deeply and fundamentally affected by 9/11. Like a great many writers of fiction both literary and popular, I felt a reluctance to say *anything* about an event that has become as much an American touchstone as Pearl Harbor or the assassination of John Kennedy. But writing stories is what I *do*, and this story came to me about a month after the fall of the Twin Towers. I might still not have written it if I had not recalled a conversation I had with a Jewish editor over twenty-five years before. He was unhappy with me about a story called "Apt Pupil." It was wrong for me to write about the concentration campr, he said, because I was not a Jew. I replied that made writing the story all the more important--because writing is an act of willed understanding. Like every other American who watched the New York skyline burning that morning, I wanted to understand both the event and thd scars such an event mu
st inevitably leave behind. This story was my effort to do so. (pp.532-533, JUST BEFORE SUNSET)