What Kind of Tears? 9/11 and the Sublime

Year 2001, Issue: 14, 91 - 96, 01.10.2001

Vernon Hyde Minor

Abstract

Nearly everyone in the world knows and has some deeply held, personal response to what happened in New York City and Washington, D. C., on September 11, 2001. The extraordinary sight of wide-bodied Boeing airplanes speeding like bullets down Manhattan Island at near the speed of sound, a mere 500-800 feet above the busy streets, then smashing into the city’s tallest buildings, eventually reducing them to rubble—these sublime acts of terror stunned the world. In a sense, we witnessed two types of the sublime as defined by Kant, the terrifying and the splendid. The terrifying arises from the great power and speed of these projectiles carrying helpless, unknowing passengers, and the dreadful toll in lost lives; the splendid results from the magnificence of the airplanes and the remarkable, gargantuan architecture of the twin towers. Most of us knew the experience not from being there or from descriptions, but from representation—through the lenses of cameras that captured so much of what happened that day