an is made of ordinary things," the poet Friedrich Schiller once observed, "and habit is his nurse."

Habit in New York City vanished in the wake of the World Trade Center disaster, and everywhere, the ordinary has been invested with the tragic. The terrorists used ordinary tools — airplanes, box cutters and knives — to turn ordinary office buildings into tombs, to transform an ordinary workday into hell on earth.

And ordinary objects — what the writer Christopher Morley called "the small ridiculosa of life" — attested to the devastation: the hundreds of high-heeled shoes left lying on the streets, shed by women running for their lives; the torrent of documents and books and papers left blowing in the wind; the collection of clocks at the Tourneau watch store, stopped in their tracks.

Birthday, graduation, wedding and prom photos were transformed from mementos of happy occasions into missing-persons documents; toothbrushes, hairbrushes, T-shirts into DNA samples; a tattoo, an earring, a favorite nail polish color into a means of corpse identification. A Brooks Brothers store became a temporary morgue; a Burger King, an evidence room.

Everyday words underwent a dark transformation as well. A sports columnist for The Daily News said she was putting an embargo on the word "hero" to describe athletes. The word "recovery" — as in "the rescue effort is becoming a recovery effort" — became associated not with celebrities like Ben Affleck and Robert Downey Jr., in rehab, but with abandoned hope. "Edgy" went from being an adjective connoting hip, downtown art to being a description of the anxiety racking the city. And talk of "asymmetrical hemlines" at New York's Fashion Week gave way to talk at the Pentagon of "asymmetrical warfare." As for the names of television game shows like "Survivor," "Fear Factor" and "Jeopardy," they seemed more farcical than ever.

It seemed too early to make wholesale declarations, as some critics did, that irony, frivolity and celebrity worship were dead and gone forever — the fallout of World War I, after all, took years of trench warfare to affect the literary imagination; the same with the Depression — but for a time at least, the terrorist attacks made everyday entertainments like going to the movies or going to a ballgame seem like a trivial indulgence. They also made cultural products from two weeks ago seem like artifacts from a vanished era — a distant gilded age, oddly innocent in its narcissistic obsession with money and fame.

It was difficult to read magazines that went to press before Sept. 11, like Entertainment Weekly's special collectors' issue of "The Best of Friends! The Ultimate Viewer's Guide" or W's "Ab Fab" issue with an exclusive "At Home With Brad Pitt." It was more nauseating than usual to read Jerry Springer's lineup for the past week's shows, which included segments titled "Wet, Wild and Naked" and "Tales of the She- Males!" And it was hard to take seriously commercials for varicose vein treatments, discount mattresses or home burglar alarm systems (offering the purchaser peace of mind) that began to resurface on news broadcasts.

To address the tragedy or try to carry on as though nothing had happened, to dwell on the disaster or seek a delicate balance between the normal and the shellshocked — these were the questions facing entertainers, athletes and broadcasters. Sports vanished from their usual place on the back pages of the New York tabloids for a week, and the Yankees and the Mets donned hats from the New York Police Department, the Fire Department and the Emergency Medical Service.

The Yankees were not even booed, as is customary, when they arrived at Comiskey Park in Chicago: one man shouted, "We love you, New York," and the White Sox fans all cheered.

Meanwhile, television producers hastily erased images of the twin towers from sequences in shows like "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and "Spin City," while Rand McNally & Company added the word "site" to the spot on its map formerly designated as the World Trade Center.

When a visibly shaken David Letterman returned to the air on Monday, he paid tribute to the city, its police officers and firefighters and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in an earnest and affecting speech that was completely shorn of his usual smart-aleck humor.

The following day, Jay Leno tried to make a similar statement, but his efforts to portray himself as the nation's "cheermaster" felt scripted and strained.

In fact, most television performers' attempts to grapple with the situation were stilted. Alan Alda spoke of his grief on "The View," then tried to promote one of his coming movies as "an example of how great this country is." Rosie O'Donnell asked for donations for a fund benefiting the families of New York firefighters, then announced that she had learned at a Weight Watchers weigh-in that she had lost two pounds in the last week — probably as a result of being upset and having diarrhea.

Clear Channel Communications suggested that its 1,170 or so radio stations avoid playing certain tunes. Its list of 150 tunes included, understandably, songs like Metallica's "Seek and Destroy" and Soundgarden's "Blow Up the Outside World," but it also came out against innocuous songs like Peter, Paul and Mary's "Leaving on a Jet Plane" and Louis Armstrong's "What a WonderfulWorld."

A Almost everything MTV and VH1 broadcast in the last week felt wrong. Their programming as usual — videos of people prancing and dancing about in bikinis, or interviews with the likes of Destiny's Child — played like reruns from a frivolous past. But the showing of a special video from CameraPlanet.com — which played a song titled "Overcome" over grisly disaster scene footage, as a tribute to emergency workers — felt gruesome and voyeuristic.

With President Bush and Mayor Giuliani urging Americans to return to work and show the terrorists that they had failed to rattle the American way of life, taking an airplane flight, buying stocks or going shopping suddenly became a patriotic act.

Mundane activities like visiting Grand Central Terminal or Pennsylvania Station were imbued with a small frisson of fear; so were jaunts to Madison Square Garden, where visitors were subjected to metal-detector searches, to watch Eric Lindros play in a Rangers uniform.

After Sept. 11, life in New York, life in America, was never going to be the same — a reality brought home, in myriad small ways, by the altered way in which we looked upon the familiar.

Tourist snow globes featuring the twin towers; Safeway Car Service's taxis, stenciled with a silhouette of the city; and most of all, the skyline arm patches worn by many New York City firefighters — henceforth, all would be impossible to look at without a spasm of sadness. Even the famous "I H NY" poster, designed by Milton Glaser in 1975, underwent a poignant change: the new one reads "I H NY MORE THAN EVER," with a black smudge scarring the bright red heart.

And yet a week after the disaster, small glimpses of the ordinary were slowly returning to New York City. Zegna suits and Marc Jacobs frocks had replaced some of the flags hanging in the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, and on their WFAN sports chat show, Mike Francesa and Chris (Mad Dog) Russo more or less abandoned talk of terrorism to return to discussions about the looming baseball playoffs.

Even in the blocks around ground zero, occupied by convoys of police cars, Fire Department vehicles, Con Ed vans and heavy machinery, there were signs of ordinary life. As the rescue workers continued to toil in the 16-acre disaster site, residents who had been allowed to return to their neighborhood apartments took afternoon strolls, ate ice cream cones and went for bicycle rides. In light of what occurred on Sept. 11, such ordinary activities — the mundane prose of daily life — now seemed poetic, signs of survival and hope.

Still, it would take awhile. In what used to be the shadow of the World Trade Center, a couple of children played catch, their faces obscured by dust masks.