From the Editor

The appearance of my first editorial for fort da was sadly bound up in time with the tragedy of 9/11 and here we are four years later reminded once again of the face of destruction. The devastating hurricanes in the South, each of them given informal and unassuming names as if to introduce a sense of ease and to humanize their potential threat, have devastated large swaths of the landscape and with it has come a significant loss of life and livelihood. The destructive and unimaginable forces of nature and humanity, with their inevitable traumatic residue, never seem to be far from home, and sometimes it is unclear how these events, when not directly experienced, impact our lives.

Before his untimely death in 2001, the German-born author, W. G. Sebald wrote an article entitled “The Natural History of Destruction” (The New Yorker, November 4th, , pp. 66-77). Sebald was only one year old when the Second World War ended, but he was profoundly aware that his life had been impacted even though he had not been directly involved.

I spent my childhood and youth on the northern outskirts of the Bavarian Alps, in a region that was largely spared the direct effects of the so-called hostilities. At the end of the war, I was just a year old, so I can hardly have any impressions of that period of destruction based on personal experience. Yet, to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me, one from which I will never entirely emerge. (p. 66)

On a recent summer excursion, I found myself traveling aimlessly along the smaller lanes that criss-cross the Marin Headlands. There is very little traffic and each new bend in the road (of which there are many) beckons another view or sight, but this is not the road to take if you want to go somewhere in particular. While the hastily passing country scenes abound in beauty, and the eye often wishes to linger, t