World trade center. (When words don't fail).

Several weeks before the attack on the World Trade Center, a friend gave me a copy of Seneca's essay "On the Shortness of Life." In the days since, sentences from it have mingled with the memory of standing on a fire escape in Brooklyn and watching the towers burn like monstrous candles. "It is not that we have a short space of time," Seneca writes, "but that we waste much of it." Enumerating the occasions of such waste, Seneca describes the desperate pursuit of social status, of wealth that few can hope to obtain, of routine pleasures one has ceased to enjoy, of power for the sole reason of its own display, and a litany of other sinkholes of time and vitality. I am not by nature a pessimist and certainly not an ascetic, but these words hit home in ways that were unimaginable just a short while ago, as the shades of people I did not know and of one artist I knew slightly added themselves to those of friends who have died of AIDS and others who have been forced to deal urgently with time's preciousness and the ir control over its expenditure.

Seneca's call for economy also reminded me of the carelessness with which words are put into circulation during moments of crisis. Any text one turns to that makes language precise and valuable is a corrective to the profligate banality in the media. And any book that sharpens one's understanding of how people in other places may be appalled by what happened to us, but are less surprised than most Americans are about why it did, is a starting point for taking beneficial advantage of the interval between this cruel awakening and the next.

Robert Storr is senior curator in the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is organizing "Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting." the first full-scale survey of the artist's career in New York, which will open at MOMA in February.