What Don DeLillo achieves in such a perfect way is this mixture of looking at the present with a critical perspective (is there any other way) and understanding more than condemning what he sees and describes. For a while now I have been trying to remember where that phrase is from: The ruins of the future. I saw this woman in Berlin driving her kids to school in this old Mercedes, a big car she could never have afforded back when it was new and she a student of Germanistik at the Freie Universität Berlin. Now she is most likely married to another self-employed person or a man who owns a creative agency and might even make a lot of money – still, no way they could afford a car like this, a new Jaguar, a Range Rover, a Phaeton. So what is this car, this hijacked symbol, this emblem of success long past: It is a ruin of a future that held a promise which was not hers (she studied Germanistik, mind you) and that will never be hers. But the materialism remains. This is the continuity. The car is the shell of a future that once was. I know this is not what DeLillo had in mind. I gave up on trying to remember where I heard that line and turned to the Weltgedächtnis. And Google told me: It was the Don who coined that phrase, in December 2001. He was reacting to the events of September 11 – time, he showed, was bangled and broken, had become unhinged, time was the target of the attacks, because the medieval thugs had attacked modernity itself in the form of a building, a lifestyle, a promise that was built on the assumption that there is always tomorrow. There isn’t, it turns out. “We can tell us”, DeLillo writes, “that whatever we have done to inspire bitterness, distrust, and rancor, it was not so damnable as to bring this day down on our heads.” It is, in other words, a matter of narration.