I feel reticent and unqualified to make any sort of original commentary on 9/11. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that we're still shocked -- and American policy, bombings and the sheer confusion as to how we should proceed since that day have proved a suitable reverberation. Here's the best of what I've read today, the most memorable out of a amorphous mass of tributes, mentions, delirium:

• German Joys points us to this piece from Prospect Magazine about the possible causes of 9/11. Exhaustive, but conclusive -- Bergen sees bin Laden overextending himself and his organization, but still undercutting the ten-plane attack suggested by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in an attempt to get the U.S. to scale back from the Middle East. While making a convincing reality within which the attacks were possible, Bergen also vents America's latest noxious emission: conspiracy thories implicating Jews, Saudis, and the U.S. government itself. Try watching Loose Change without wishing the government would silence Dylan Avery, even if it would lend his blathering credence.

• McSweeneys re-ups a beautiful speech delivered by writer John Hodgman two weeks after 9/11. He contextualizes 9/11 in the terms of storytelling, illustrating one way to comprehend it: by compacting it to sanity through words, "which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us" -- er, that's Gene Wolfe, one of my own favorite storytellers. If you know a better, more universal method, I'm all ears.

• Finally, this piece from the Boston Globe (via Dialog International) explains how 9/11 was the end of American civilization, and this without resorting to bathos or superlatives. The final cries, calls and messages that remain from that day all attest to a truth beyond the nihilism. What is it Severian says in The Claw Of The Conciliator? "In the final reckoning there is only love, only that divinity." Or, alternately, the regret that it could never be fully expressed.