Eyewitnesses to history: from Pliny to 9/11

Recalling the terrible events as they unfolded in live television pictures from New York on that crisp September morning seven years ago today, it is the images that overwhelm. The words uttered do not linger.

So how does the eyewitness reporter set down what happened that day to fix it in the collective memory? This was the problem John Updike addressed in his wonderful reportage for the New Yorker a day or two later.

"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness," wrote Updike. "From the viewpoint of a tenth-floor apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where I happened to be visiting some kin, the destruction of the World Trade Center Twin Towers had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect reception...

"It seemed, at that first glance, more curious

than horrendous: smoke speckled with bits of paper curled into the cloudless sky, and strange inky rivulets ran down the giant structure's vertically corrugated surface. The WTC had formed a pale background to our Brooklyn view of Lower Manhattan, not beloved, like the stony, spired midtown thirties skyscrapers it had displaced as the city's tallest, but, with its post-modern combination of unignorable immensity and architectural reticence, in some lights beautiful.

"As we watched the second tower burst into ballooning flame (an intervening building had hidden the approach of the second aeroplane), there persisted the notion, as on television, that this was not quite real; it could be fixed; the technocracy the towers symbolised would find a way to put out the fire and reverse the damage."

This is eyewitness reporting at its best, a journalist able, with a few graphic words and images, to place the reader at the scene, to sense the moment of magic or horror of great and wondrous events. This has been so since men and women first felt the need to tell great tales