The September 11, 2014 issue of The New Yorker included a piece titled “Reacting to September 11th,” which tells of the first issue published after 9/11 in which “Updike and eight writers grappled with the September 11th attacks.”

“‘A four-year-old girl and her babysitter called from the library, and pointed out through the window the smoking top of the north tower, not a mile away.’ That’s how John Updike found out about 9/11, according to the Talk of the Town story he wrote for the September 24, 2001 issue of this magazine.”

Updike’s complete September 24, 2001 column is available online here.

“From the viewpoint of a tenth-floor apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where I happened to be visiting some kin, the destruction of the World Trade Center twin towers had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect reception,” Updike wrote.

“As we watched the second tower burst into ballooning flame (an intervening building had hidden the approach of the second airplane), there persisted the notion that, as on television, this was not quite real; it could be fixed; the technocracy the towers symbolized would find a way to put out the fire and reverse the damage.

“And then, within an hour, as my wife and I watched from the Brooklyn building’s roof, the south tower dropped from the screen of our viewing; it fell straight down like an elevator, with a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion distinct across the mile of air. We knew we had just witnessed thousands of deaths; we clung to each other as if we ourselves were falling.”