Word: towering
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Tania Head told her story of survival again and again, quietly and memorably, so that the atrocities of 9/11 would not be forgotten. She told it to me in the summer of 2004, over coffee in Times Square. Head was on the 78th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center when a plane struck the building, she said. The fire burned her terribly. She made it out, only to discover that she'd left her life behind: her fiancé was in the North Tower, she said, and he had died. She did not dwell...
...talking with other survivors who knew her, and looking back on my own notes, I am struck by the paradox of her case. After 9/11, there were thousands of stories of suffering, each exquisitely painful. But Head's tragedy was different. It was a story of surviving one tower - only to be metaphorically crushed by another. And ironically, it may have been the unimaginable scale of her suffering that gave her the freedom to tell her story any way she wanted, without the burdens of consistency or specificity. Then again, that could all be hindsight talking...
...fellow survivors gave Head a wide berth, too. "All of us are so deferential to each other," says Peter Miller, a financial planner who was on the 65th floor of the North Tower on 9/11 and who has worked closely with Head over the years through survivor events. "We just assume we're always on the brink of getting emotional." He remembers noticing one inconsistency in Head's story: Miller was there when I met Head for coffee three years ago. During our conversation, he heard Head refer to her fiancé. Years later, while conducting tours of Ground Zero...
...that were denounced by China's State Bureau of Cultural Relics. "It's ridiculous that they brought them back to a part of China to be sold," says Tsang Kin-shing, a Hong Kong district councilor who helped organize public protests against the auctions. "If we stole the Eiffel Tower and ... took it to France to auction, the French people would definitely not be happy...
...architecture. And the museum fell along the border between the eastern and western parts of the city, suggesting that it might be part of one of the many deconstructionist paradises that sprang up on land formerly occupied by the Berlin Wall. Instead, I found a stark block of residential towers and an overgrown park set well off Friedrichstrasse, the thoroughfare where Checkpoint Charlie used to stand. The highly experimental architecture of the museum, which opened in 2001, was all the more startling for its failure to conform to its location, a disharmony that filled me with both confusion and understanding...