11. September 2010

An einem Herbsttag

Bis vor zwei Wochen vor dem Unglück ging ich oft an den Türmen mehrmals am Tag vorbei und reckte meinen Kopf, bis es nicht mehr ging, um ihre Spitzen zu sehen, was mir aber nie gelang. Ich sah sie von der Ellis Island aus, von der Aussichtsplattform des Empire State Building, habe es aber nicht gewagt, noch höher zu steigen, um die Stadt von Twin Towers aus zu betrachten. Es war mein erstes Mal in New York. Noch hatte ich das Glück, das unbeschwerte Leben da kennenzulernen und einzuatmen... Als "es" geschah, hat es mich ins Herz getroffen...


9/11 Times Nine

"(...) The piece that has stayed in my mind most vividly, somehow, is one Anthony Lane, our film critic, wrote about disaster movies, of all things—a Schwarzenegger vehicle, “Collateral Damage,” had been postponed because of the attacks. In particular, I remember this passage:

To be forced to disdain the ideal in favor of the actual is never a pleasant process. Even at its worst, however, it can deliver a bitter redemption. We gazed upward, or at our TV screens, and we couldn’t believe our eyes; but maybe our eyes had been lied to for long enough. Thousands died on September 11th, and they died for real; but thousands died together, and therefore something lived. The most important, if distressing, images to emerge from those hours are not of the raging towers, or of the vacuum where they once stood; it is the shots of people falling from the ledges, and, in particular, of two people jumping in tandem. It is impossible to tell, from the blur, what age or sex these two are, nor does that matter. What matters is the one thing we can see for sure: they are falling hand in hand. Think of Philip Larkin’s poem about the stone figures carved on an English tomb, and the “sharp tender shock” of noticing that they are holding hands. The final line of the poem has become a celebrated condolence, and last Tuesday—in uncounted ways, in final phone calls, in the joined hands of that couple, in circumstances that Hollywood should no longer try to match—it was proved true all over again, and, in so doing, it calmly conquered the loathing and rage in which the crime was conceived. “What will survive of us is love.”" weiter lesen

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