Ground Zero Report

1098 Words5 Pages
Ground Zero Reading Report September 11th, 2001 is a date that will forever reside in the minds of every American old enough to remember the events that occurred that day. Since then, many individuals, families and groups from the USA, and from around the globe, have visited the site where the terror attacks transpired, now known as ground zero. Suzanne Berne was one of the visitors to New York City to view the location where the Twin Towers once stood. She is the author of the personal essay “Ground Zero”, in which she tells the story of her trip, and the confusion she initially had when viewing ground zero, and how suddenly pieces seemed to pop out and become visible to her. Suzanne’s first descriptions of the weather in New York while she was visiting connect very well to the unpleasant story that is connected to her trip there. This unpleasant weather that accompanied her can be seen in her descriptive terms in the first two paragraphs. “...cold, damp...”, “...raw wind...”, and “...spits of rain...” She tells of people she saw “Standing on the sidewalk, pressed against aluminum police barricades, wearing scarves that flapped into their faces and woolen hats pulled over their ears…” which gives an idea of the wind and chilly temperature that day. She then tells that even without anything to see when viewing ground zero, people were still intrigued by this site. She explains how all the people standing on that sidewalk were “…craning to see across the street, where there was nothing to see.” This expresses to the reader how even without anything there to see, people were still intrigued by this site. But then she elaborates on this “nothing to see”, and how even though that may be what it looked like at first, “…’nothing’ becomes something much more potent, which is absence.” Here is when it seems that, on an emotional level, she came to better understand
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