Five Years Later: Reflections and the loss of reflection
The largest tragedy from September 11, 2001 — as the many media tributes are reminding us today — was the senseless loss of thousands of lives and the untold number of lives adversely affected by the deaths resulting from the infamous terrorist attacks in three U.S. locations. Secondarily, the financial impact and the lingering health problems of rescue and recovery teams add to the cruelty of the generation-defining incidents of five years ago today.
A quick search of the Internet reveals how today’s technologies allow a modern-day news event like 9/11 to be extensively chronicled, analyzed and remembered. A fair amount of PDF-based material, especially the various official reports and proceedings generated by the attacks and their aftermath, helps to recount the human tragedy and the related acts of heroism from many perspectives.
As well it should, much of the post-9/11 analysis and reflection deals with the lives lost and the lives changed. The mourning will last a lifetime for the unfortunate, innocent people and families that were directly victimized.
Taking a step back from the emotion and scale of the human loss, New York also lost something with a more symbolic value — its spiraling World Trade Center towers, which came crashing down the same day each was intentionally hit by hijacked commercial airliners.
“The World Trade Center Remembered” [PDF: 64kb] offers an interesting assessment of the significance of the WTC, both prior to 9/11 and since. Written by Ned Kaufman, a consultant specializing in cultural heritage, historical preservation and public history, it was published in a 2002 newsletter of the Association for Art History.
Kaufman notes his personal perspective after carefully observing the WTC for several years:
“The towers were so big and projected their bigness with such profound simplicity that they seemed to exist in the realm of sky and wind, rather than that of architecture. New York’s harbor is a vast area, filled with air and light and the reflections of moving water, overarched by an immense sky. The towers, sited on the promontory of lower Manhattan, registered the moods of light and weather in a way that only things of great size and immeasurable scale can do–things that are there with a bigness too big to grasp. When you looked at the towers you saw not just buildings but the imprint of the place itself, the sky coming down to earth, the impress of sun, sea, and wind sweeping across a continent. A shadow cast by one of the towers was not just bigger, but qualitatively different from those of ordinary buildings–it didn’t belong to architecture at all; it was a phenomenon of nature.”
Now you see only a still sadly symbolic hole.
