Daffodils and the Hole

Gurstein talks about the late afternoon walk she made with her husband at Union Square in New York City where they recalled how heart-breaking the place was following the September 11 terrorist attack. The very paths they were now walking on had been home to a seemingly endless roll of butcher-block paper upon which grieving strangers had left additional messages-poems, prayers, political broadsides, drawings, anything that might speak to the occasion. As they recalled the larger feel of the place, it now seemed as if the citizen-mourners who gathered those first nights after the Twin Towers had vanished into dust filled up every square inch of the place because they quite simply could not stand the emptiness--a true, lived, horror vacui.