For many people, says IAN BROWN , this year has been defined by the compulsion to remember, the desire to move on, and the difficulty of knowing the difference. No matter how much this week's anniversary is exploited for commercial or political gain, we each will follow those urges in our own ways

A year has gone by since the awful day, and the strangest thing of all is how much we don't want to forget one dreadful instant.

At first, in the immediate aftermath, people fixated on the pile of silver debris at the foot of what had been the World Trade Center, and the way it never seemed to get any smaller. The task was hopeless. But on Sept. 22, the search for human remains was moved off-site, and then the pile began to shrink faster. Eight-and-a-half months later, at 10:29 a.m. on May 30, 2002, ringing fire bells marked the end of the cleanup - almost a year and a half sooner than predicted, at a cost of $1.15-billion, a small fraction of the original $11-billion estimate.

An unthinkable task had been accomplished, but the closeout was upsetting too. At that moment, ground zero lost its reassuring power as a spectacle, as a living monument.

Yet the spectacle stayed alive by moving around the city, and there was some relief in that. For a while, people crowded around the walls of leaflets posted by relatives of the missing. Then a viewing platform built to let tourists look into ground zero became a monument on its own, as did Union Square, where New Yorkers met to smoke and cry and talk and mourn.

These days, a lot of attention is being paid to Chelsea Jeans, a clothing store on Broadway near Fulton Street, where the owner has left a corner of the store intact from the day of the attacks. Shirts and jerseys still hang on their hangers, covered in dust; papers and receipts and expense statements (even from Cantor Fitzgerald, the trading firm where so many died) litter the floor where they fell.

People have been visiting the preserved corner of the jeans store from all over the world. They want a glimpse of Sept. 11 as it actually was, unfiltered, unadulterated. But sales in the rest of the store are down, and it's due to close by mid-month. Then the last living artifact of the day's horror will be gone too.

But as the physical tragedy abates and the emotional traumas recede, the commemoration of 9/11 has become an industry in which grace, restraint and the simple mourning of the dead have been left far behind. Memorial services are naturally planned where each of the four hijacked planes crashed. But the decision to have New York Governor George Pataki read Lincoln's Gettysburg Address at ground zero on Sept. 11 has created a huge flap that encapsulates the entire debate over what should be commemorated and why.

Abraham Lincoln delivered the famously short Gettysburg Address in 1861 to commemorate 6,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who died during the worst single battle of the Civil War. Objections to using the same speech at ground zero centre on the passage that reads, "We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that the nation might live" - a wildly inaccurate description of Sept. 11 victims, who were office workers and business people making a living, not soldiers fighting over the emancipation of slaves.

Others consider the choice entirely appropriate: The only effective way to honour the dead of Sept. 11, they say, is to declare the nation's resolve to rout the terrorists who curtailed the lives of free and innocent people. The Gettysburg Address thereby politicizes ground zero into a war memorial - and into an argument to justify, for instance, an invasion of Iraq.

(Certainly no one is commemorating George W. Bush's limping war on terrorism. According to a draft report issued by the United Nations last week, efforts to freeze al-Qaeda's assets have stalled, and with reserves of anywhere between $30-million and $300-million, the organization is "poised to strike again how, when and where it chooses.")

A one-minute period of formal silence will also be observed on Sept. 11. But then all hell breaks loose. ABC plans 14 hours of coverage. NBC has a six-hour Today show. CBS has President Bush. By one conservative estimate, 90 hours of special-event television are planned.

Competition is so fierce on the first anniversary of "the national trauma," as The New York Times called it recently, some TV stations are offering to pay "experts" for exclusive access to their wisdom. (Happily, many of the experts are turning them down.)

More than 150 books have been published, from the serious (Wil-liam Langewiesche's meticulously reported American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center) to the craven (Chicken Soup for the Soul of America) and the asinine (Deepak Chopra's The Deeper Wound). At the American Tribute Center, a new non-profit organization owned by an employee of a brokerage, you can create a book commemorating your own lost loved one. The cost is $7,000.

This is a new commemorative ritual, the spawn of television: We honour most what we can get the best pictures of. Franklin Roosevelt did nothing to commemorate the first anniversary of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, though some parts of the country observed 30 seconds of silence. Memorial services a year after John Fitzgerald Kennedy's assassination in 1963 were observed by television cameras, albeit mostly in churches. By the time Diana, Princess of Wales, died, the global televisual grievathon was 24-7, at once moving and a parody of itself. But 9/11 coverage makes Diana's funeral look like a suburban cable show.

A year ago, I called my friend Charlotte Pierce in Boston and told her that the towers were falling, and she wept openly into the telephone. Ever since, her husband, David Wilcox, a Texan who is a clinical instructor in psychology at Harvard Medical School, has felt compelled to read everything he can about Vietnam. He doesn't know why. "I think it's because I want to learn about this war where our soldiers could not see whom they were fighting," he told me the other day. "It's the same now."

This year, he was so concerned about the possibility of an attack on July 4, he prohibited his children from watching fireworks on Boston's Esplanade. "I don't really feel safe in America any more," he told me. "Not the way I did two years ago. I really don't. It has changed my whole kind of thinking."

Susan Bolotin, a Manhattan editor, was in her office at Workman Publishing when the planes hit. She spent most of the morning trying to find out if her son had made it safely through the Battery Tunnel to school in Brooklyn before the planes struck. (He had, though he couldn't get home for five days.)

Last week, as her holiday on Cape Cod came to a close, the commemoration debate - how to commemorate what, and why - was a steady topic of conversation. "You see, when we left our summer place here on Labour Day a year ago, we were different people," she explained. She hasn't gone all the way to becoming a conservative, but she is now a more complicated liberal. "Watching the victims of terrorism, I always said, `I feel their pain.' But I never felt their pain."

Two weeks ago at a drive-in movie, she watched her fellow Americans climb out of their cars to stand for the national anthem. There was a time when the mere playing of the national anthem at a drive-in would have given her pause. Now, she is merely astonished that people stand up.

"Stood up! Got out of their cars! I mean, there are so many moral conundrums now. It's made things so complicated. Even just displaying the flag. Before, you always had a position. And now I say, `I don't know.' I've had to learn to live with maybe."

As for her children, they just want this year's Sept. 11 to be over. "It makes me feel incredibly sad. And I think that's appropriate. But I think you then have to move on. We just have to get to Sept. 12."

I want to think it's a private form of commemoration, but maybe it's just pornography. Paul Tough, the former editor of Saturday Night who now works as an editor at The New York Times Sunday Magazine, where he has been preparing articles for the magazine's own commemorative issue, tells me that he has stopped looking at such pictures. "I find it less productive," he said. "It doesn't move you forward."

He's a Manhattanite, a trench-dweller who lived through the nightmare but found the past year in New York "a really hopeful period," one that "had a positive effect on the country, though that seems like a weird thing to say."

It doesn't seem like a weird thing to say, but I still can't stop looking at that picture.

It reminds me of that day, and the way the past and the future were pushed aside by a shocking continuous present from which it was impossible to escape. It reminds me of the people who died, innocents, and the people who killed them, criminals.

But mostly, it shows me something no one ever sees. "It's a quality of experience that is so outside of the ordinary," David Wilcox said when I mentioned the picture. "Part of it is just trying to take it in. I wouldn't call it morbid. It's a media event of mass destruction. Hiroshima, no one filmed that."

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud postulated that every civilization is the product of a battle between two fundamental instincts - eros and thanatos, the will to live versus the urge for death and destruction. For 100 years, just as America dominated the planet, New York city was the world's most prominent urban manifestation of eros, of the life force - the imperial city of More and Now and Yes and Go. For one day, on Sept. 11, that force imploded, and we saw its shadow, its opposite, the darkness that lives within the light.

In the end, whether you gaze into a photograph or watch images replayed on TV or stand quietly in a crowd on the street to honour those dead and that event, I suspect we're all paying tribute, or at least respect, to the same challenges: That the opposite of going on is the force that doesn't want us to; and how important it is to choose between them - although, in a mourning ceremony that is already being used as a battle cry, they sometimes look a lot alike.