Thursday September 11, 2003 at 6:55 PM
Remembering the Doomed
Appearing in American Culture
Two years ago today I was sitting at this very table, doing as I’m doing now. Never having been mistaken for a “morning person”, it was a rare September morning that found me awake and writing before the rest of the household. I had been up for perhaps an hour when the phone rang, “turn on the TV”.
It was then that I first encountered the images which are now as much a part of my memory as any event of my adult life or random happening of my childhood. Even after two years of “precision war”, suicide bombings, and “collateral damage”, their effect on me remains undiminished: airplanes swallowed whole by buildings the size of mountains; conscious bodies descending from heavenly heights suspended forever by the blink of a camera; and impossibly distant images of secretaries and stock brokers struggling to escape the destiny of their final moments.
While each of those images invokes a certain reaction in me, it is the images of those searching for rescue that I find the most haunting. The crashing airplanes, the flying bodies, these are the images of action, decision, control. Photographs of the doomed however, they are the images of terrorism: vulnerability, fear, confusion. They are however, also the images of humanity, capturing as they do our capacity for hope.
Somewhere in those images, through the grain and the smoke, you can find the illogical seeds of hope, the impossible opportunity for escape, the irrepressible faith in rescue. Waving to the helicopters as the building dissolved beneath them, there is in the photographs a hint of the same primordial reflex that must have led victims of the Titanic to don life jackets one particularly clear night in April of 1912.
Placed in such circumstances, I wonder who among us would solemnly accept their fate and who would hold onto hope — hold onto hope despite all evidence to the contrary.
