At the end of “Weather Conditions in Lower Manhattan, September 11, 2001, to October 2, 2001,” the first text that I wrote about the experience of witnessing some of the events of 9/11 “with my own eyes,” I noted in a May 2002 CODA,

“‘In the years to come.'” This is the irritating narrative device used by the writers of the American Experience programs on PBS this season [2001-2002], including their history of New York City. It gives the narrator an omniscient yet melancholic tone. Using this device one can place oneself at the inaugural of the memorials that will inevitably be built at the site–in all likelihood safe and unimaginative. Or one can imagine yet a further moment: In the years to come the destruction of the World Trade Center became a distant memory, as the people of New York adjusted to the new streets and buildings that replaced the behemoths that once had anchored the great skyline of New York.“

There was in the early years of remembrance an esprit to corps of the city and a fetishization of the events of the day that approached a romance. That gradually faded in the light of the war in Iraq and of the trump years. So how to feel about the anniversary in this twentieth year that has come?

And yet as the anniversary brings historic accounts and renewed viewing of footage, every minute of that first day, every image, is astounding.

Over the years I have published several versions of my first text describing what I saw with my own eyes that day, then my impression of the memorials, The Towers of Light, and the Memorial’s twin reflecting pools. With this tag you can work your way back through time through these recollections and photo essays of the day and its immediate aftermath, and critical views of what happened in “the years that came.” I’m compelled to share them yet again, despite whatever sense of estrangement from the intensity of the original moment.

This week I’ve watched a couple of documentaries about September 11. In one an image struck me and gave me another view of the small bit of personal experience that was instantly so searingly memorable–I expect to have forgotten things, which is why I wrote all these remembrances immediately as well as in “in the years that came,” to make sure that I remembered, but at this point I don’t expect to have images reveal anything I had not apprehended at the time. The film incorporated footage shot on September 11 by the Naudet brothers, Jules and Gédéon, who by happenstance captured the moment the first plane flew low over Lower Manhattan and hit the North Tower, sounds which I heard “with my own ears.” At the end of their documentation of the day itself, there was an aerial view of “Ground Zero” from that first night and I could place myself geographically in relation to what it showed.

From the bottom left of the picture keep going and I can follow a line about ten blocks north where I lay in bed in the fourth floor rear loft at 60 Lispenard Street, fully dressed except for pants which I placed on a go bag near the door, in case we would have to evacuate because of gas leaks or fire. The TV had gone out when the North Tower fell so paradoxically I couldn’t see the coverage of what was happening in my own neighborhood. I can place myself again in the dark, alone, in some form of shock and excitement, but that night I did not picture this scene just a few blocks from me, it was unimaginable.