HIROSHIMA

I had just turned nine years old on this day in 1945, the day America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Because it was August, I would not have been away at school, but would likely have been somewhere in England, caravanning with my parents. It's possible we were camped out near my grandparents's cottage in Aberporth, a village on the Cardigan Bay in Wales. A report about the bomb and its massive destructive power must certainly have reached my parents on the BBC evening news that day, but I do not remember hearing about it in any significant way. It may be that I have simply forgotten having heard. 

It was a long time ago. Seventy-five years. I was just a bit older then than my younger grandson is today. Thinking of him, how smart and well-informed he is about what's happening in the world, I think it's likely that I did know at the time, but was too young to have fully registered the magnitude of the event. There had been bombs dropping all over Europe for some years already. German bombers had emptied their bays and bombs had exploded not half a mile from my house. We were not exactly a target, in the small village where I lived; they were simply jettisoning what remained of their load after an attack on London, to speed their return to base in Germany. Still, I was perhaps by this time somewhat inured to the terror, and could have thought that the Hiroshima bomb was just another one, but bigger.

All of which is merely to remind myself that world-shattering events take place while people everywhere are just doing ordinary things--as W.H.Auden so beautifully puts it in his poem, Musée des Beaux Arts, about the Brueghel painting of Icarus falling from the sky...

... where "everything turns away/Quite leisurely from the disaster" and "[suffering] takes place/While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along." With more than a hundred thousand human lives being snuffed out in the blink of an eye at the other side of the world, my family was likely sitting down to dinner or just waking from a nap.

I think I only fully registered the enormity of the Hiroshima bombing (and that of Nagasaki, three days later) some years later, on reading the John Hersey account; and perhaps, still later, seeing the 1959 Alain Resnais film, "Hiroshima, mon amour," the story of a love affair in shadow of a larger human tragedy. Today, the anniversary of the bombing, it behooves us to recalls that turning-point in our history--the moment at which we learned that it has become entirely possible for us to destroy our entire species and free this lovely, uniquely habitable planet from our troublesome presence. Sadly, subsequent events, including those through which we are living at this present moment, have made it clear that we risk failing to learn the lesson that was offered us. The nuclear threat, certainly, is less imminent than it once was, but our negligence and self-indulgence has proved the source of other, equally lethal paths toward extinction.