Hiroshima mon amour: The horror of forgetting

"Sometimes it's important to ignore the difficulties this world presents. Otherwise, it would become unbearable."

Last year, I visited the 9/11 memorial in lower Manhattan for the first time. I’m not sure why it had taken me so long. I had gone downtown years before when the area was still being rebuilt and transformed — when you could still get a sense of the blow the city had taken — but I hadn’t seen it finished. It all felt new. It was, in a certain kind of way…