5 Feet of Fury

‘I’ll admit I went to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum with a bad attitude’

John Derbyshire writes:

Two things did arrest my attention. One was a huge “composite”—a great lump, a dozen feet across, of hyper-compacted metal, building materials, office equipment, and perhaps, in its interior, flattened and carbonized human fragments. Just a formless lump of flattened wreckage, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

The other was a partially walled-off recess, just big enough for a half-dozen people, on the inner wall of which were projected, one after another, still pictures of jumpers. There is no accompanying sound, just the pictures. In one of them there are five jumpers strung out in the air, yards apart. Colleagues, friends, lovers—who knows? What is it, this human life, to end in such horror?