Karolyne Gonzalez
Dr. Holly Elliot
ENC 1101
23 September 2014G

Reading Response 4

Tuesday, September 11, 2001 was a bright beautiful morning in many regions of the United States. The Twin Towers stood tall in the Financial District, as they had for 28 years. A husband gave his wife his last Good Morning kiss, a firefighter put on his uniform to go to work and a mother dropped off her daughter at her very first day at work at the World Trade Center. At approximately 8:46 in the morning phones started to ring. The World Trade Center has been hit by two commercial aircrafts who were hijacked by suicidal terrorists. In the essay ‘’Ground Zero’’ written by Suzanne Berne, the author describes her trip to Manhattan’s financial district, to pay her respects to what used to be the World Trade Center. She mentions how this will be her first time visiting Manhattan’s financial district. She describes how people all around the world came to Ground Zero to do the exact same thing she was doing… stare at nothing: ‘’Many of them were clutching cameras and video recorders, and they were all craning to see across the street, where there was nothing to see.’’ (182). She had no idea what miraculously thing she was about to see and as her eyes started slowly to adjust, that nothing she was seeing became something much more powerful. That is why the quote: “if you look at something long enough it starts to look different” perfectly applies to this essay. Meaning that the longer she stared at that nothing, the more details she could see. As the essay proceeds, Berne begins to describe the different things she saw at Ground Zero. She started to envision for the very first time. Berne uses abundance figurative language to help the reader get a better image of what she was seeing that day: ‘’suddenly you notice the periphery, the skyscraper shrouded in black plastic, the boarded windows, the steel skeleton of the shattered winter garden.’’ (183). Berne used many different types of feelings in her essay. For example she wrote about how the large amount of people who came