Short Essay On 9/11

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"Latch the telescope before you lock the axis," I advise my brother as I had been advised many times before. He nods in agreement, visibly excited. "This, my son, is the real show," my grandfather would say as we lay on the roof, staring out into the night-sky, the constellations telling tales of heroes and gods. "These are the great storytellers." I was only seven when my grandfather first spoke those words to me, and at the time, I was more in awe of the aesthetic spectacle that I beheld than of any sense of grandeur a priori. One question, though, lingered. "But how can stars tell stories, Dada Abu?" He smiled, saying everything and nothing with that simple gesture. As time went on, my initially unsophisticated stargazing burgeoned …show more content…

At night, I would stand at the edge of the roof with my grandfather and gaze into the horizon, marveling at the beauty of the North Star and challenging myself to identify the constellations I had seen in encyclopedias. Alas, even the brightest stars can flicker into oblivion: In 2010, my beloved grandfather suffered a stroke and slipped into a comatose state. Seeing the seemingly evergreen adventurer, who had first introduced me to stargazing, lying motionless in a hospital bed, reminded me of something I had read long ago but fully comprehended only then: even seemingly perfect stars can collapse into an infinitesimal point, leaving behind an ironically obscure legacy of their former selves. A few days after the incident, in an attempt to bridge the void, in a small way, I opened Cosmos - an astronomy book - hoping that it could somehow bring me closer to my grandfather. It was then that I realized another, less poignant aspect of collapsing stars: the atoms that form us were all born in the cores of stars, and found their way across the universe when the stars collapsed. The star's

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