New Orleans Memories

Brian writes beautifully of a trip with friends in 1993 to sample the jazz (rather than the nudity) for which New Orleans is justly famous.

On a related note, novelists Anne Rice and Richard Ford provided lovely discussions of their home town in Sunday's Times.

I try not to dwell on my personal loss here, faced with such far reaching tragedy, but one can never entirely leave his own skin, and so I am at once uncomprehending of the scale of loss beyond the simple observation that I will never know the New Orleans of my first 30 years. And that is a personal tragedy of sorts. The above writings only exacerbate the ache this thought causes.

We are a country with a history rendered anemic by its youth; New Orleans, at least in my mind, has hovered in my imagination as one of the very few American cities that rivals in its wealth of artifact and custom to those of western Europe. How much of this is wishful thinking I will never ascertain, but in any event there's an Atlantean aura about the whole intellectual exercise now. I've no doubt that the city will be rebuilt. But how differently?