ABSTRACT
There are many ways to tackle the relationship between language and experience. One is to listen to people who have had experiences they feel escape their words and, often enough, escape words at all. There is of course an odd paradox about listening to people in order to understand experiences that seem to evade words. This essay is about this paradox. It is concerned with such elusive experiences and how people talk about them. It draws on accounts made by eyewitnesses of the events of September 11, 2001 in Manhattan. I should say right at the beginning that my work on these accounts has been more diffi cult than usual. The accounts were collected as part of a larger psychological study carried out by the New York-based “National 9/11 Memory Consortium.” I had been invited to study this collection of material but since the day I agreed I have felt ambivalent about the entire project; and what’s more, I also have felt ambivalent about my own role in “doing research” on the reactions, refl ections, and emotions of people who were immediately affected by the attacks on the World Trade Center. But let me start with how it all began.
