Ten years on… An extract from ‘Falling Man’

Ten years on, and to this day, I can still remember where I was when the reality of what I was witnessing on TV struck me;  numbly sitting on a stool in the kitchen, absorbing in silence, the devastation thrown upon us in a shattering moment. Nothing removes the harrowing images that still haunt our memories of that day, yet through the worst atrocities of man, the best of humanity prevailed.

September 11^th shall always be engrained into our associations with America due to the suffering caused on that day, but it is the perseverance to overcome and regenerate from the grief that now defines this day of remembrance.

I have chosen an extract from Don DeLillo’s ‘Falling Man’ to share with you today.  It presents the shattering haste in which the events played out, but also how the media saturation following 9/11 has affected our assumptions, judgments and opinions towards others everlastingly.

‘In time he heard the sound of the second fall. He crossed Canal Street and Began to see things, somehow, differently. Things did not seem charged in the usual ways, the cobbled street, the cast-iron buildings. There was something critically missing from things around him. They were unfinished, whatever that means. They were unseen, whatever that means, shop windows, loading platforms, paint-sprayed walls. Maybe this is what things look like when there is no one here to see them.

He heard the sound of the second fall, or felt it in the trembling air, the north tower coming down, a soft awe of voices in the distance. That was him coming down, the north tower.

The sky was lighter and he could breathe more easily. There were others behind him, thousands, filling the middle distance, a mass in near formation, people walking out of the smoke. He kept going until he had to stop. It hit him quickly, the knowledge he couldn’t go any farther.’

Ten years of remembrance. Still as prominent in our minds as ever.