One morning in Boston, where I lived, I found a corner store that still had a copy of The New York Times. Paper discoloured, edges peeling, that issue sits beside me now. Its date is Sept. 12, 2001; the forecast was sunshine, high of 72, a few clouds.

A decade has passed since 9/11. I’m not going to pretend to write something significant here. I don’t think my blog is any place to describe the magnitude. I lived in the city where the planes took off, I evacuated my skyscraper workplace in silence, I watched the towers crumble live on television 30 minutes later. I received phone calls from friends I hadn’t spoken to in ages. It has changed me personally, though I’ve yet to investigate how.

I’ll turn to the Times as everyone prepares to look back on Sept. 11, perhaps the heaviest date on the modern calendar. That Sept. 12^th edition is a remarkable piece of journalism. Its front section is 27 pages long, with an incredible array of stories about the events of the previous day and their greater context. Its content is now historical record – a newspaper’s greatest contribution to society.

To be a reporter that day, filing a story couldn’t have been easy. You are in shock, along with everyone else. Your cell phone has no life. Your newsroom has been evacuated. The downtown of your city is a cloud of ash. There are no officials to tell you what has happened. On-the-street interviews would seem starkly out of place, wrong even. The city editor would assign, what exactly, to his or her reporters? What could be adequately expressed?

Particularly in a high-tech society where we spill simple RIPs into social media by the thousands, where brevity kills meaning, it pays to take a step back. There are no OMGs here. It feels appropriate to leaf through my weathered copy of the Times and pull things from within. It all unfolds under the simple headline: U.S. ATTACKED.

The lead story, entitled “A Creeping Horror” begins: “It kept getting worse.”

• The front-page photo is of a tower exploding, stomach-churning only because we know what happens next.
• “Rescue Workers Rush In, But Many Do Not Return”
• All they bought were plane tickets from Boston to Los Angeles.
• A photo of soot-stained New Yorkers crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on foot.
• The shockwaves registered on earthquake-measuring equipment.
• The Pentagon has its first-ever terrorist attack.
• Bush says he’ll hunt the terrorists and their supporters, stomach-churning only because we know what happens next.
• “…smoke and debris blotting out the sun…”
• Nobody knew where to go. Inside, outside? North, south, east west? People hid beneath cars. Some contemplated jumping into the river.
• “New Degree of Horror Changes New York, Temporarily, Into a Small Town”
• A man is photographed plunging headfirst through the air, a simply indescribable image, which later won a World Press Photo award.
• “When the Unimaginable Happens, and It’s Right Outside Your Window”
• A witness describes seeing a jet fly over the Statue of Liberty, like in a movie.
• “Attackers Believed To Be Sane”
• A close-up blurry shot of people hanging out the window of a tower, trying to breathe, 100 stories up
• “Passenger Reported Hijacking Shortly Before a Crash”
• “Boston’s Airport Security Described as Standard”
• “Security Long a Concern at U.S. Airports”
• “Physical and Psychological Paralysis of a Nation”
• The next-worst terrorist attack ever killed 329 people, numbing only because we know what happens next.
• “Counterterrorism Officials Caught by Surprise”
• “Condemning Attacks, Taliban Says bin Laden Not Involved”
• All Canadian domestic flights were cancelled as airports took in scores of U.S.-bound planes
• “Years of Unheeded Alarms”
• One letter-to-the-editor, Muslim, apologizes and asks if the U.S. will follow its own advice or seek revenge
• “Live Images Make Viewers Witnesses to Horror”
• “A Different World,” one columnist predicts
• The lead editorial starts: “Remember the ordinary, if you can.”

In fact, this infamous issue is available in its entirety here: http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/9-11imagemap.html. (You may have to sign up for free first.)

Like I said, newspapers are the written currency of human history since they were first inked. They are what we learn from, the day we read them, and decades later. The least we can do is voyage back to the day of terror and relive it so that those who lost someone they loved don’t have to do it by themselves. At least for one day.