In New York Monday evening and Tuesday. I've always felt comfortable there, and easy, and always with a thrill at first sight of the skyline. I wrote here last fall: No matter how many times seen, there are few sights like the Manhattan skyline, but the sense now of what's missing still catches you and leaves the vista suddenly tinged with ache and sadness and loss.



A working trip this time, but not onerous in any sense, and lodged with a group from work at the Ritz at Battery Park. Walking distance, then, from Ground Zero, and we all were drawn there, some for the first time. Excavated and largely cleared now, of course, and vast in its desolation, murmuring sorrow as you look. But girders there fused in the shape of the Cross of our salvation, and of lordship over death. Lifted above the loam and the debris in the first weeks after the cataclysm, lifted for solace by men fulfilling their vocation of rescue and protection.



There was a sculpture that stood in the plaza fountain between the World Trade Center towers. The Sphere by Fritz Koenig. Bronze and steel. A monument fostering world peace. It was found in the rubble, gashed and torn but structurally intact. It's now installed, with an eternal flame burning before it, in Battery Park. One of our group led us over there after dinner in Tribeca. Quiet there under the trees in the park, somber there in the darkness, memories stirring there in the light breeze.



Fritz Koenig said his sculpture now has a different beauty, one I could never imagine. It has its own life - different from the one I gave to it.