Excerpts from "Leap" by Brian DoyleA couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.
Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.
Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.
The mayor reported the mist.
A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes. [...]
Stuart DeHann saw one woman's dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaing hand in hand.
Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.
But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the windows holding hands. [...]
Their hands reaching and joining is the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here. [...]
Maybe they didn't even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but the did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near LIberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.
Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold onto that.
3 comments:
I am mesmorized by B. Doyle's prose because he manages to squeeze so much heart into every phrase. I don't know how he does it, but I'm trying to figure it out. Whether he's expressing joy or pain or sublimity, he does so with an inspiring grace.
i really love that he says that it's what makes him believe that "human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires..."
i went to an exhibit yesterday that included some photos taken during/right after the korean war. the images were incredibly haunting - young children, orphaned, rummaging through piles of trash looking desperately for food - but the most poignant of all was a photo of two people reaching to hold hands with each other. in that moment, there was more greatness and more holiness, more eloquence and grace than anything we can imagine.
i watched the portishead video again, looking specifically for the images of people reaching for each other, and i feel like that's what delivers the calm in the images. everyone is falling, there is a moment of disconnectedness, but then they reach out for each other again.
what holiness.
yes, yes that is EXACTLY what it is!
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