BRET STEPHENS2026年9月10日 Adam Gray/Getty ImagesThree days before 9/11, I hosted an out-of-town friend who wanted to take in the view of New York from above. I suggested a drink at Windows on the World, in the north tower of the World Trade Center. We arrived a minute too late to catch the last elevator to the 107th floor.9·11事件发生前三天，我招待一位外地来的朋友，她想从高处俯瞰纽约。我提议去世贸中心北塔107层的“世界之窗”餐厅喝一杯。我们迟到了一分钟，没赶上最后一班电梯。“Next time,” I remember telling her. Of course there wouldn’t be one.“下次吧,”我记得当时这样对她说。当然，不会有下次了。Many years of living in a city creates a kind of archaeology of private memory. A street corner, a bar, an office building, a playground, a spot where a favorite restaurant or bookshop used to be — each recalls a buried layer of life, and each has its own circumstances, its web of relationships, its emotional color.在一个城市生活多年，会沉淀出一种私人记忆的考古层。一个街角、一家酒吧、一栋办公楼、一个游乐场、一处曾经钟爱的餐厅或书店的旧址——每一处都唤起一段被掩埋的生活，每一处都有各自的境遇、人际关联和情感色调。In 1998 I got a job with The Wall Street Journal, which at the time had its offices across the street from the Trade Center. My subway stop was at Cortlandt Street; my gym was on the top floor of the Marriott that stood between the towers. That summer I overnighted a hard copy of my master’s thesis to London from the courier service in the sunlit lobby of the south tower and said to myself, “School’s over forever.”1998年，我入职《华尔街日报》，当时报社办公室就和世贸中心隔一条街。我每天在科特兰街站下地铁；健身房在双塔之间万豪酒店的顶层。那年夏天，我在南塔阳光明亮的大堂的邮差服务点把硕士论文打印稿连夜寄往伦敦，我对自己说：“学业永远结束了。”Now and then the thought of another terrorist attack, like Ramzi Yousef’s 1993 underground bombing, crossed my mind. But I never imagined jetliners slamming into buildings, incinerating perpetrators and victims alike.偶尔我也会想到再次发生恐怖袭击的可能，比如拉姆齐·优素福1993年策划的地下爆炸案。但我从未设想过喷气式客机撞入大楼、行凶者与受害者一同被烈焰吞噬的场景。On the day itself I was in Jerusalem on assignment for The Journal. I watched the towers come down on TV and wondered who among my colleagues had been killed. (None had, miraculously, despite some close calls, and they performed the additional miracle of putting out a paper the next day for which they won a Pulitzer Prize.) For one of the few times in my life I felt an overwhelming desire to pray. At the Western Wall I found this in the Book of Psalms:事发当天，我正在耶路撒冷为《华尔街日报》做报道。我在电视上看着双塔倒塌，心想同事中会有谁遇难。（奇迹般地，无人遇难——尽管有几人和死神擦肩而过，而且他们还完成了另一项奇迹——第二天照常出版报纸，并因此获得普利策奖。）那是我一生中少有的几次感到强烈的祈祷冲动的时刻。在西墙，我在《诗篇》中读到了这段经文：Lift up thy steps because of the perpetual ruins, even all the evil that the enemy hath done in the sanctuary. Thine adversaries have roared in the midst of Thy meeting-place; They have set up their own signs for signs.求求你，移步来这无沿的废墟，看敌寇施暴，圣所的惨状：你的仇人在会幕里咆哮，悬他们的旗帜与图符。I moved to Israel for a new job soon afterward. When I came back to New York three years later I had a family, as well as an office with a direct view of the giant pit called ground zero. For a long time nothing seemed to happen inside it, or if it did, it was at a glacial pace. It struck me as emblematic of a post-9/11 national paralysis, “testifying,” as I wrote in a bitter column from 2009, “to a society in which everyone gets their say and nothing gets done.”此后不久，我因一份新工作移居以色列。三年后回到纽约时，我已经有了家庭，办公室正对着那个被称作“归零地”的巨坑。很长一段时间，坑内似乎毫无动静，即便有，也如冰川般缓慢。在我看来，这象征着9·11之后全国性的瘫痪，“证明着，”我在2009年一篇心酸的专栏中写道，“一个每个人都有发言权却什么事都办不成的社会。”I was wrong.我错了。Ground zero may have been stuck in legal gridlock — and coated in more toxic dust than was previously acknowledged. But the neighborhood around it was springing to life, thanks to a combination of civic spirit, government subsidy and capitalist creativity. Between 2000 and 2026 the number of downtown apartments nearly tripled, from 13,000 to 37,000, according to The Journal. Battery Park City, the neighborhood directly west of the old towers, became an oasis for families with young children, including our three. I never worried for the safety of my kids in the 16 years that we lived there.归零地或许确实一直困于法律僵局——并且覆盖着比此前公开承认的更多的有毒粉尘。但它周围的社区正焕发生机，这得益于公民精神、政府补贴与资本主义创造力的共同作用。据《华尔街日报》报道，2000年至2026年间，下城公寓数量增至原来的将近三倍，从1.3万套增加到3.7万套。炮台公园城——旧塔正西边的社区——成了有幼童家庭的绿洲，我们家三个孩子也在其中。在那里生活的16年里，我从未为孩子们的安全担心过。Except once. On Halloween of 2017, two of our kids were out when I heard a crash and what might have been a gunshot, then one police siren after another. My 12-year-old son came home to tell us that he had seen a truck smashed at the corner of our street with blood on its windshield. An Uzbek man named Sayfullo Saipov had driven a rented Home Depot truck down the Hudson River bike path, killing eight people and injuring many more.只有一次例外。2017年万圣节，我们的两个孩子还在外面，我听到一声撞击和可能是枪响的声音，接着警笛声一辆接一辆。12岁的儿子回到家告诉我们，他看到一辆卡车撞毁在我们这条街的拐角，挡风玻璃上有血迹。一个名叫赛义富洛·赛波夫的乌兹别克斯坦男子驾驶一辆租来的家得宝卡车沿哈德逊河自行车道冲撞，导致八人死亡，多人受伤。President Trump used the occasion to rail against immigration — and Chuck Schumer. But what I remember was the calm good judgment of our neighbors, many of them immigrants themselves, who sheltered the students at P.S. 89 just as they were being let out from school. It was America at its best. The kids trick-or-treated that night as usual.特朗普总统借此事抨击移民——以及查克·舒默。但我记得的是邻居们冷静而明智的应对，其中许多人本身就是移民，他们给刚放学的第89公立学校学生提供了藏身地。那是美国最美好的一面。那天晚上，孩子们照常挨家挨户讨糖果。And ground zero did come back. On Monday, another old friend came to town and we toured the site together. The early September weather was perfect, just as it had been 25 years ago. Thousands of people, locals and tourists alike, shopped and chatted and gawked at the sights around us.而归零地也的确复苏了。周一，又一位老朋友来到纽约，我们一起参观了那里。9月初的天气完美，一如25年前。成千上万的人——有本地人也有游客——在我们周围的景点购物、闲聊、驻足张望。We visited the shrine of St. Nicholas, a stunning replacement for the unassuming Greek Orthodox chapel that once stood a stone’s throw away on Cedar Street. We walked through the oak-shaded plaza encompassing the memorial pools ringed by the names of the fallen. We went down to the vast underground mall that looks (in the best possible way) like the rib cage of a gigantic dinosaur and which, from a certain spot, gives a neck-craning view of the spire atop the tallest of the towers surrounding the site. We both remembered the plaza of the old World Trade Center, so intimidating and sterile. What we have now is so much better: reflective but not somber; commanding but not forbidding; sheltering but not closed.我们参观了圣尼古拉圣堂，这座令人惊叹的建筑取代了原先坐落在雪松街近旁那座朴素的希腊东正教小教堂。我们走过橡树荫下的广场，广场环抱着纪念水池，池边刻着遇难者的名字。我们下到巨大的地下商场，它的结构像一只巨大的恐龙的肋骨骨架——这绝对是一个赞美，从某个角度仰头望去，可以看到环绕遗址的最高塔楼顶端尖顶。我们俩都记得旧世贸中心的广场，那样冷峻而缺乏生气。如今的一切好太多了：引人沉思却不阴郁；气势庄重却不拒人千里；给人庇护却不封闭。It’s a magnificent civic achievement.这是一项了不起的城市公共成就。On Sept. 11, 2001, the forces of death paid a visit to Lower Manhattan and extracted their awful irreparable price. Twenty-five years on, what’s clear, most of all to those of us who saw both sides of that date, is that the forces of life proved much stronger.2001年9月11日，死亡的力量造访曼哈顿下城，造成了可怕而无法弥补的代价。25年过去，已然清晰的是——尤其对我们这些经历过那个日子前后两个时代的人来说——生命的力量被证明远为强大。Bret Stephens是时报观点版面专栏作者，写作领域包括外交政策、美国国内政策以及文化议题。 欢迎在Facebook上关注他。翻译：经雷点击查看本文英文版。