Half awake this morning, stumbling from the shower, I heard something on NPR that has stuck with me all day. At Sunday’s memorial service in Yankee Stadium for the victims of the September 11 terrorist attack, one rabbi said that six thousand people did not die on that day. One person died, six thousand times.

That sent me looking for this half-remembered verse by John Donne: …any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.. I hope we can remember that, in the days to come, in our calls for war, we who are so ready to kill, so hungry for revenge. No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. I don’t see how more death will honor anyone’s memory.