Meditation at Ground Zero
John Clabby
Issue date: 10/8/01 Section: Spectator Views
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Last Saturday, two Princeton alumni, two years out, together visited ground zero of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center for two quite different reasons.
The alumna looked for closure, perhaps an end to the bad dreams and the slow mornings in suburban America, no longer prompted to early action with a commute. She had been high in World Trade Center Seven that morning, and in the eighteen minutes separating impacts she reached ground level. After the second plane hit, she sprinted uptown through the blasted canyon while flaming debris rained around her. The after-image, when she shuts her eyes and thinks of the towers, glows with fire and swells with an expanding column of choking smoke.
The return to lower Manhattan helped ease the seared corners of the residue, perhaps beginning the process of true mourning, of gradual acceptance, and of healing. She will never forget what happened or her final picture of the Trade Center, but she might replace her anxiety with the knowledge of her survival, and for her a skyline bare of the towers aids more than one of towers afire.
The alumnus was in professional school several hundred miles away when he heard the news, gripped first with feelings that this could not have happened. He feared for his friends he knew worked in the area and in the towers, but he could not shake the feeling of unreality he associated with the attack. He imagined that the pictures on his television were themselves bad dreams, and found it easy to distance himself from the dreams in local occupation. Though in his home state, he was suddenly struck with an immense loneliness, and a need to reunite with his closest college friends. His trip was in part to recognize that the events of September 11 actually occurred, to probe the troubling wound of the nation and also to assess his loneliness. More appropriately, perhaps, he sought to gain some sympathy for those who suffered and still suffer because of the attack.
The alumna looked for closure, perhaps an end to the bad dreams and the slow mornings in suburban America, no longer prompted to early action with a commute. She had been high in World Trade Center Seven that morning, and in the eighteen minutes separating impacts she reached ground level. After the second plane hit, she sprinted uptown through the blasted canyon while flaming debris rained around her. The after-image, when she shuts her eyes and thinks of the towers, glows with fire and swells with an expanding column of choking smoke.
The return to lower Manhattan helped ease the seared corners of the residue, perhaps beginning the process of true mourning, of gradual acceptance, and of healing. She will never forget what happened or her final picture of the Trade Center, but she might replace her anxiety with the knowledge of her survival, and for her a skyline bare of the towers aids more than one of towers afire.
The alumnus was in professional school several hundred miles away when he heard the news, gripped first with feelings that this could not have happened. He feared for his friends he knew worked in the area and in the towers, but he could not shake the feeling of unreality he associated with the attack. He imagined that the pictures on his television were themselves bad dreams, and found it easy to distance himself from the dreams in local occupation. Though in his home state, he was suddenly struck with an immense loneliness, and a need to reunite with his closest college friends. His trip was in part to recognize that the events of September 11 actually occurred, to probe the troubling wound of the nation and also to assess his loneliness. More appropriately, perhaps, he sought to gain some sympathy for those who suffered and still suffer because of the attack.