Senses
Now I want to ask you something else. How do you guys experience something? Let’s just pretend you’re walking down the street and it’s raining. How do you experience the fact it’s raining? What do you do? You get wet. You feel it. So how do you experience something? You experience something through your senses.
On September 11 2001 I was running towards the World Trade Centre when it came down. I was in Manhattan and was running towards it and I experienced that and it came down in front of me and I realised I was in the middle of what was arguably the most significant event since the end of World War Two. I was there, and my job was purely to describe to people what it was like to be in Manhattan on September 11 as the World Trade Centre came down. That was my job, that day. And what I did, I fell back on this. And I wrote the top piece that you can see in 20 minutes by the side of the road in lower Manhattan and I was writing as it happened. And I was writing as the second tower came down. And I’m just going to take you through a few paragraphs that demonstrate I’m not making it up, this is the real trick of the trade.
Third paragraph: The air is thick with the smell and taste of sulphur and I feel almost physically sickened by the disaster of almost impossible proportions which is unfolding around me. So I’m using smell and taste. A little further down, I’m describing the sound of sirens is almost deafening. Again, further down in the second column this is the moment the second tower came down. I hear a second creaking sound followed by a crash. It isn’t deafening. It’s actually sickeningly quiet. And as we watch, the remaining tower just dissolves, to be replaced by smoke. And that was the amazing thing, you might think that there would be this almighty cacophony of sound and your eardrums would split as this huge building comes down. I was watching it and it hardly made a sound as it came down. And no one around me made a sound because we were just stood there, like this. And it was only once it had fallen down and things were flying everywhere that everyone started screaming and running. So what I’ve done there is use the senses to describe, try and put people there, as if they were there so the whole idea is to put people in your shoes.
I want you to look as this painting now, which is ‘The Execution of Lady Jane Grey’, painted by a French artist called Paul Delaroche. It depicts the last moments of an English girl called Jane Grey, who became Queen for nine days. After nine days she was found guilty of treason and executed. What I want you to do is to use that picture to do what I did on September 11. I want you to describe it, very simply. You’ve each got the five senses written down, I want you to write next to each of the senses, one word or one phrase, but it only has to be one word, on what it would taste like to be in that room. |
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