Ground Zero

Suzanne Berne's entire essay emphasizes emptiness and absence becoming something. She visits ground zero expecting to see images that the television and newspapers portrayed on September 11, 2001. When she arrives she sees absence of it all, nothing but light is seen. Suzanne states, "Ground zero is a great bowl of light, an emptiness that seems weirdly spacious and ground, like a vast plaza amid the dense tangle of streets in lower Manhattan." Based on her description ground zero is nothing. As she stands and admires it longer “nothing becomes something” and she states, "this is the moment when absence begins to assume a material form, when what is not there becomes visible." She begins to describe the awful destruction of the twin towers, firefighters, and ambulance vehicles. She also describes how nothing but the word unbelievable can describe the sight or the feeling of being at ground zero. As she stands on the viewing platform with a crowd she sees people write on the plywood, this makes her realize the emptiness and absence is being filled. The emptiness of the people who were lost is filled with the thousands of visitors who go to ground zero.