I began watching the coverage at 8:02 a.m., and heard the first attempt to compress the metric ton of horror into a sound bite about two minutes later. The reporter was listing recent narrow escapes from terrorism, citing the 1993 bomb in the World Trade Center, and the bombs stopped at the Canadian border in 1999. "You might say," he intoned, "that this is the day that America's luck ran out."

But because events were still unfolding--and perhaps because they were still new to me, bleary-eyed and coffeeless--his aphoristic gambit failed. The attack was still too visceral, the flames still leaping, for such a summing-up to stick. As it turns out, several days later, this tragedy is still, for me at least, as horrifying and impenetrable as the moment I first perceived it. But this is appropriate, this uninterpretability. None of the narratives we know apply.

The impulse to interpret, to reduce something into a story we're familiar with ("America Under Attack," for instance), springs from the need to make something surreal and horrifying into something relevant and meaningful. In the last two days, I have been thinking about the failure of language to describe an event like this, an obstacle that Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge hit in a Wednesday, September 12 New York Times article when he ran through a list of words that did not adequately describe his disbelief. "Irrational, cowardly, despicable, unconscionable, immoral... the dictionary is inadequate," he said. "There aren't enough words." New York Governor George Pataki refused in an interview Tuesday morning to use the word "dead" to describe the people in the towers; "at risk" was the best he could do.

And the visual tag lines that networks assigned to the story ("America Under Attack," "Terrorism Hits America") couldn't contain the dread. None of these squibs began to describe--despite the strong language, the intense brevity--in any way what was happening. None of the political euphemisms can keep despair and fury away.

An NPR story on Wednesday had a reporter sifting through the papers in the World Trade Center debris, finding resumés and letters and following the trails to their logical ends. Not a bad premise: a patchwork of loss, a mute tally of objects. But the urge to sanctify is inevitable; the reporter closed with the observation that all these pieces were "artifacts of lives... [significant pause] and dreams... [another pause] that were." Jump to the president looking somber and angry (his approval ratings jumping, for no apparent reason other than his gravitas). Jump to the vigils, the memorials, the tender essays written by children. Jump to the call for vengeance, the blood lust. Fade on a shot of the American flag at half-mast.

This is not just sentimental, but also dangerous, neatly bypassing ideas that we have yet to wrestle with. I'm not speculating about whether retaliation is right or wrong. I'm talking about being swept away by seductive and palliative rhetoric, much like the example set during the Gulf War, when "We support our troops" became an acceptable way to avoid the insulting anti-patriotism of the Vietnam War while still not condoning American action. In the end, it was impossible to distinguish between well-meaning anti-war sentiment and pro-war hawkishness, and many people who used the phrase felt that they had been tricked into embracing something they never meant to support.

This time there are new traps. Our newly rediscovered capacity for patriotism and the need for closure might result in a rush to judgment or action. We should have learned, most recently with the execution of Timothy McVeigh, that closure itself is illusory, a healing catchword that rarely has anything to do with actual healing.

These attacks may very well turn out to be the only real news of our lifetimes--but the movement toward pre-digesting it before the shock has even worn off is something we know too well how to do. We've learned how to grieve publicly from Oklahoma City and the death of the Princess of Wales. We've learned outrage from Bill Clinton's dalliances. We've learned unlikely national unity from the Gulf War. We've learned to narrate these events until they're safe and manageable and unthreatening.

Certainly there will be heroes. Certainly there are already villains. But I am unwilling to use known formulas to turn it into a greeting-card sentiment in order to understand it or feel safe again. There is the time before the attack, and the time after. It is nothing less than absurd. There is no story to redeem it.