Varian opened this issue on Sep 13, 2001 ยท 48 posts
Varian posted Fri, 14 September 2001 at 12:24 AM
Paul, thanks for the update on your condition and for sharing your experiences and feelings. Through the power of television, I was watching live coverage when the towers collapsed. As the first began to go, I could see it happening and understood what was happening before the reporter speaking knew. He was talking about the fires and saying "there's some more smoke now", and I was thinking no, not just smoke, that whole thing is coming down -- and so it did. Incredibly the second followed not long after. The utter and stark contrast of "now you see it, now you don't" has been replayed on TV now a hundred thousand times. Each replay is still astounding. I can only imagine what that "before and after" must be like in person, to those like yourself who know the area as home.