"[This book] embodies the Buddhist wisdom about change, life, and the
world more than anything written after the events of that day."
Robert Stone

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August 28, 2006

PREGNANT PAUSE

For much of the last week, BagNewsNotes has had a lively discussion about a particularly arresting photo from the book. The picture shows a pregnant woman, Isabel Daser, standing in the street on September 11, having asked a coworker to take her picture in front of the stricken World Trade Center, not realizing that a terrorist attack is under way. Daser, an architect and amateur pilot, appears with a quixotic Mona Lisa expression, as if uncertain what mood to convey for the camera.

As she explained to me: "I [had flown] around 'the twins' myself in a Cessna several times before. So I asked my colleague to take this picture. You can tell by my face that I didn't want to smile, as you normally do in pictures. I know that many hobby pilots take pictures while being on the commands at the same time. So I could imagine one 'tourist pilot' having an accident. We didn't know the truth yet." (When her daughter was born, three weeks later, Daser named her Amelia, after the pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart.)

The image, in fact, is one of many from September 11 that contain a quiet promise that the cycle of life is destined to go on, even as terror takes its mortal toll. In a similar vein, photographer Alex Webb would comment about a photograph he took that day on a Brooklyn rooftop, showing a mother and child overshadowed by a doomed and smoking cityscape in the distance. Pictures like these -- focusing on observors surviving, not on the object of their anguish -- capture "a kind of incongruity," says Webb, "which I often feel exists in situations of strife and which is often ignored: life continues in the face of disaster...despite the horrors we inflict on one antoher. [The pictures] also provide some questions: What kind of world is this child being born into? What does the future hold?"

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