September 17, 2001

Dear Peter:

I'm still under the spell of our time in Manhattan. Late at night, en route to Ground Zero, we shared a sacred hour in a Midtown coffee shop. Although we were very much alive to the world, we were unusually quiet, dwelling comfortably in our thoughts.

I was surprised by how readily we gave one another — and others — the benefit of a doubt. We understood that we needed to take good Muslims at their word. We realized we were in danger of losing something important: the conviction that men and women of good will need to find one another in the rubble.

Outside the coffee shop and still a long way from Ground Zero: the smell of something burning. We turned south and soon saw the devastated buildings that lined the holy site. We stood, struggling to understand the mechanism of their destruction.

And we saw the bobbing of the cranes. From a distance, there was something very human about their movement, stooped as they were, feeling for life in the ground.

A Franco-American's gloss on the Raelian affair

Bush's 2003 State of the Union address