A walk around the void of 9/11

Walk onto the plaza in Lower Manhattan and you hear the memorial before you see it — a whooshing through the oak trees. You soon realize it’s not the wind, but water. At the footprint of each tower, north and south, a vast square emptiness is bound by four walls of falling water, the pool below pouring into a smaller central void that flows out of sight. The memorial is black upon black, but the water casts reflections. Sunlight and mist make fragmentary rainbows that flicker as clouds go by.

Tourists are milling about and buying souvenirs, guides are explaining, construction workers on the perimeter are relaxing. Though it is a murder scene, the memorial is not a morbid place. The trees soften it, as does the presence of children who have no memory of that morning, 15 years ago on Sunday.

There is an underground museum nearby, if you want to immerse yourself in that day. But the event is hard to grasp in full if you never saw the towers intact, if you never gazed straight up between the two pinstriped columns and got dizzy at the scale. And if you were not downtown that day, and did not have to flee uptown or across a bridge, did not have your memory seared by the smoke, the dust, the smell, the incomprehension.

The memorial has the power to gently push you back — not to horror, but maybe to tears. This is the effect of seeing the thousands of names, incised in bronze rows, five deep, encircling the fountains. Each row is like a lei of five strands, lives linked by work or some other related or random circumstance, and one awful fate.

Walk slowly, and let your eyes absorb the loss. Jeremy “Caz” Carrington, of Cantor Fitzgerald. Deepa Pakkala, Marsh & McLennan. Uhuru Houston, Port Authority police. Maybe technology someday will allow us to hover over a name and hear a story, summon a life, see the braid of loved ones formed over a lifetime and then, suddenly, snapped. Who were these dead, and where might life have taken them? William Mahoney, Fire Department Rescue 4. Michael Quilty, Ladder 11. Heather Malia Ho, pastry chef at Windows on the World.

Many of them had no idea what was happening, and none knew what the attacks would lead to. The years of unending warfare, the disasters overseas, the new way of living: see something, say something, fear everything.

The memorial, blessedly, does not summon any wretched aftermath. It summons, instead, dignity and honor — of the victims who called home, leaving messages of love, of the first responders who rushed toward the smoke and flames. There was great bravery that day, and exemplary leadership in the days and months after. Rudy Giuliani, creating calm and unity; George Bush, honoring the workers and the fallen amid the wreckage.

Fifteen years on, the evil of 9/11 may still reverberate, but the goodness remains a thing to marvel at. And the 9/11 memorial — subdued, profound — is almost miraculous, given its tortured birth by committee. Years ago two mayors, Michael Bloomberg and Mr. Giuliani, were in a group discussing what the memorial should be. Mr. Giuliani wanted something big on that “sacred ground.” Mr. Bloomberg argued for a school, not a monument. “I always thought the best memorial for anybody is to build a better world in their memory,” he said. “I’m a believer in the future, not the past. I can’t do anything about the past.”

He was right about what we can’t do. But many of us can do this on a bright September day: Take the subway to Lower Manhattan. Walk a block or two, find the way through a construction zone and down a chain-link corridor. Take the time to walk around each void, watching the names flow by. There are too many to linger over, but read those you can and reflect on the whole. Take several turns, pondering, as a pilgrim might do, the enormity of the loss, the passage of years. And what we, the living, can do to build a better world, worthy of their sacrifice.