Last year, at the end of the millennium, many of us indulged in ritual retrospectives and prophecies. Nobody that I knew or read foresaw what 2001 would bring. I never worked out why Virginia Woolf said human nature changed in 1910, or if I did I've forgotten, but something certainly changed this year. A new insecurity kicked in. I don't know how long it will last, in its present form. Who does?

You would expect to feel it most in airports. The new world order should surely manifest itself there, in suspicious glances at unattended bags or fellow passengers who look as though they might be terrorists. And many of us did hesitate to fly in the aftermath of the event. We emailed friends and family, relaying, with varying ironic disclaimers, warnings we had received from a contact of a contact in the MoD or the Pentagon about a threat to Chicago O'Hare, or the Channel Tunnel, or the Eiffel Tower. We looked up at the skies over London, nervously. Was it sinisterly empty of its usual traffic, or mysteriously crowded with helicopters? We reminded ourselves of the story of the appointment with Death in Samara, but nevertheless I foolishly found myself telling my son not to take the grandchildren to Hamley's in Regent Street for a birthday shopping spree because of a rumour about something nasty happening in central London. They obediently went to Brent Cross instead.

And then, for most of us in this country, life seemed to go back to normal. Fear of flying became reduced to anecdotes about inconsistencies in security procedures and an irritation about not being able to travel with nail scissors - will airlines and hotels have to provide them as part of the courtesy package, if they want to keep our custom? The worst I have suffered was a dispute with an official at Stansted about the weight (not the size) of my hand baggage. When I pointed out that it would pass if I abstracted Frazer's The Golden Bough and put it in my handbag instead of my hand baggage (a fine distinction, I admit) she was not amused. Hadn't I heard of September 11, she asked?

There is nothing very new about such inconveniences. They are part of air travel at the best of times. The world may have changed, but who expected it would stay the same, or to go on getting so much better all the time?

Perhaps the answer is that America did. America loves life, and here in Europe we are more than half in love with death. This is our realism and also our failure. We are too accustomed to death. We relish it, clinging to our glorious past, our wars, our war dead, our war memorials, our war movies, our war novels, our steadfastness under threat, our familiarity with privation. Even the younger generations on our side of the Atlantic are constantly being reminded by people of my age that life wasn't always this comfortable, that supermarkets weren't always crammed with produce, that you can't always have what you want. One of the few things I had in common with Mrs Thatcher was a longing to hoard baked beans. My family is sick of hearing my refrain: "In my day, we didn't throw good food away." I've even been known to say, long before September 11, "Don't chuck that in the bin: don't you know there's a war on?" Old habits die hard. There is still a folk memory of rationing.

Over here, we know we are not immortal. We are used to security inspections and we are not much fazed by the concept of urban terrorism. The bad things of history are always with us. I have a vivid imagination, and I think about sudden death every day. Whenever I hear a certain kind of hissing noise in an innocent venue, like a hotel room or a library, I think not of escapes of air from radiators or faults in the central heating system but of the gas chambers. I don't know how abnormal that is. I hadn't foreseen September 11 but it was remarkable how soon it became just one more of those things to worry about. After all, each of us dies but once, however bizarrely or unfairly death may come. The world has never been a safe place. The world is charged with death. We owe God a death.

I think this may be a non-American mentality. Most of my American friends seem to have a non-American mentality, and continue to be frequent and fearless flyers. One admitted that death in an air crash seemed to her preferable to more lingering modes of departure. Another sent me an email newsletter from one Jacob Levitch at a New-York-based Progressive Community, which compares Bush to Big Brother - he argues that Bush has declared perpetual war on a shadowy unseen enemy, and is using the attack as an excuse to introduce fierce censorship to control a subdued population. (The title director of homeland security is peculiarly Orwellian, and the phrase "friendly fire" is too good to be true.)

But my contacts are not representative. Americans, if we believe what we read, have indeed gone through a profound change, and Democrats and Republicans alike are solidly behind their leader. And they have decided to stay put. Business and pleasure trips have been cancelled, and airlines have crashed with astonishing speed. (Were they always so fragile, so underfunded?) In November my husband found himself the lone foreigner at an international conference in China - about 30 Americans had cancelled. Of course, there are reasons other than fear of flying that persuade some to stay at home. One friend said he didn't want to come to Europe because it would seem like deserting his family in New York. For him, New York, like London in the Blitz, had become the front line. That is a good reason to stay at home.

Maybe some Americans really did expect death would never happen to them, and now are aware that it might. In the US, for decades, the fight against age and decay and what Philip Larkin called "the only end of age" has been conducted with more spirit than the campaign against Bin Laden. For maybe Larkin was wrong. Maybe death is not the only end of age. If we lubricate and inject and stimulate and enhance and graft and transplant and implant and clone all our body parts busily enough, if we swallow enough vitamins and essences and hormones, maybe we or our children or at least our children's children will become immortal. Maybe the human machine will one day be taught to run for ever.

A year ago, capitalism had never seemed so secure. Nobody prophesied its overthrow. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall its most vocal supporters had been openly triumphalist. History was over and capitalism had won. Then, in a day, in hours, the story changed. The fact that the terrorists had attacked the very symbol of successful capitalism escaped nobody. Suddenly, what had seemed invulnerable was transformed into all that was fragile and mortal. They, whoever they were, had gone for the skyscraper, the over-reacher. Overnight, we began to see things differently. We saw that such a hyperbolic structure as the twin towers could not fail to invite attack. The competition to possess the tallest building in the world (a distinction currently held, I believe, by Kuala Lumpur) had always seemed to me a harmless if primitive manifestation of phallic nationalism, but it has taken on a new and more sinister light.

Competition can be deadly. Of course the world's tallest building must fall down. Think about it. It has to. There is a limit to all things. I like skyscrapers. When I first saw the Manhattan skyline, sailing into New York under the Verrazano bridge in 1974, I found it more beautiful than I would ever have imagined from its image on a million postcards and movies. I love Chicago, and the view from the lakeside is one of the wonders of the world. But these glittering panoramas have now taken on a new insubstantiality. We see that the glassy clusters are shockingly frail, despite the miracles of engineering that keep their heads in the clouds, and those who work in them work in glass houses.

In the weeks after those images hit our screens, the phrase that kept coming back into my mind was "glassy essence". The words are from Measure for Measure, from the speech in which Isabella pleads for her brother's life.

. . . man, proud man
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured -
His glassy essence - like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep... (act II, scene 2)

The glossaries tell us that the word "glassy" here means "reflective", and implies that our spirits mirror the image of God, but the secondary meanings of brittle and fragile are the ones that have always leapt first to my mind. We are fragile, our buildings and bodies and institutions are fragile, and none of us are or ever have been safe.

The world is a more dangerous place than it was at the beginning of the year. There are a lot of angry apes about: some are still in hiding but you can see some of them round the clock on CNN. We instinctively try to look for good to come out of bad, and Blair has made some impressive speeches about the relief of global poverty and world debt, but I don't think that Bush is listening to him. I believe that there will be no peace in our time and no end to arbitrary terror and festering anger until the riches of the world are more evenly distributed. We need to go for wholesale, long-term redistribution. That is the only way forward to peace and safety. But I fear it won't happen.

The inequalities of the world have become intolerable and, through the spread of communication systems, intolerably obvious. In the optimistic 60s I naively expected that we were marching forward into an era of world-wide postcolonial prosperity and freedom. So I suppose I, too, once believed in an old-fashioned positivist concept of progress. Never did it occur to me that the rich would go on getting richer and that the poor would go on getting poorer, both at home and abroad, and that the rich would find this perfectly acceptable. But so it has turned out. The notion of justice as fair distribution appears to have vanished from the face of the Earth.

There is an apocryphal story that one Soviet leader - I think it was Khrushchev - looked down at the spectacular affluence of western civilisation while flying over the suburban swimming-pools and soaring financial district of some great American city, and said: "We might as well give up." Well, the Evil Soviet Empire gave up quietly, but history was not yet over. It appears that there are some who hate those glittering towers so much that they would rather destroy them and die in the act than live with their dominance.

You can call this envy, you can call it evil, you can call it religion, but this dangerous spirit has been unleashed, and it won't easily be bombed into acquiescence. The genie is out of the bottle, as Edward Said would not like me to put it, and it won't be easy to persuade it to go back in again.

Ten years ago I read John Rawls's Theory of Justice, usually described as the most influential work of political philosophy of our time. It is a key text, taught in every American university. I sometimes wonder what it influenced, apart from other theorists. We have not yet reached his minimum requirements for a just society. A minority of the world's population currently enjoys a living standard beyond the wildest dreams of the majority, and the lucky ones in the so-called developing world (time we dropped that euphemism) are those who toil for miserable pay in appalling conditions to produce tourist facilities or sportswear or other luxury items for the markets of the west. This is not unlike the dystopian satires of HG Wells, which envisaged a class of permanent proles slaving for a permanent elite. It isn't utterly removed from the national socialist vision of a prosperous Germany supplied with goods and services from its subject eastern states. No wonder anger breeds, no wonder the angels weep.

In the spring of this year, I wrote a scene in a novel in which a woman sits on an aeroplane peacefully working at a tapestry. "She deploys a little pair of silver scissors with long golden crane-bird handles. The air hostess had looked at these scissors suspiciously, as though they might be construed as a dangerous weapon, but had decided to let them pass."

Well, no more. Never again, until the world is a fairer place. And that probably means never. No more embroidering on aeroplanes. It seems a small pity in a large tragedy. But maybe those lines mean that I had seen something coming, after all?

© Margaret Drabble, December 2001