The public reports about the shock and grief suffered after the attacks on September 11, 2001, implied that those feelings were uniform and generic in everyone. And probably extremes of shock and grief, like extremes of hunger and desire, do feel the same in everyone. Yet the people who endured the transforming effects of that day were not blank slates ready to be imprinted with the same images. They brought to that moment all the events of their lives until then, and the new events, by their very force, called forth earlier shocks and reconfigured them in a new context. So the collapse of the buildings made a different sound for everyone who heard it, and for each the noise echoed in a different key.

CELIA STRENG

The fire fed on wrecked office furniture, computers, carpets, and aircraft cargo, but primarily it fed on ordinary paper—an ample supply of the white sheets that were so much a part of the larger battlefield scene. Without that paper, the experts believed, the fire might not have achieved the intensity necessary to weaken the steel beyond its critical threshold. It would be simplifying things, but not by much, to conclude that it was paperwork that brought the South Tower down.

WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE

American Ground, 2002