3638
No communist space lesbians in this one. Sorry. Instead, SCIENCE!
Anyway-we were talking about Hiroshima. Or I was. "We" no longer has any meaningful existence, where you have gone.
How depressing I am being! Rebeca, forgive me. Every time I come close to the subject of apocalypse I seem to veer away into meaningless introspection. You taught me the most fantastic word once-omphaloskepsis. From the Greek for, literally, "navel-gazing". Ostensibly an aid to certain kinds of yogic meditation; in practice, a fantastic way to describe people who love to talk about themselves.
Everything reminds me of you, that's the trouble. There is no part of life or history that you did not manage to touch at some point, no memory within me that does not bear your fingerprint, whether you were physically present or not. Perhaps in years to come people will say the same about me-but I am veering again. I find all meaning has come to tilt that way in recent years. It all comes down to you, and, in turn, to me.
Association drags us to that subject, so let us stop resisting for now. I am tired and do not want to talk about the end of the world any more. It feels too close to home.
There was a scare when we were seven or eight or so-I remember now. Some tiny-nation state waving its nukes at some other tiny nation-state, which would have been insignificant had America not taken sides. Suddenly we were all talking about World War III. I can see myself mulling in the kitchen of our old terraced house, worrying about what would happen to mum and dad and all my soft toys if a bomb fell, and mum's voice eking in from the dining room.
"Wasn't that all finished when we were kids? I thought they'd made up. I thought we'd moved on from A-bombs or H-bombs or whatever letter they're using now. No, dad, I don't know what the H stands for either. What? Well... biological warfare, I suppose. Viruses and things."
Silence. I thought about getting the flu from a bomb. It didn't seem as bad, so I thought I must have been getting it wrong.
"No-no dad, those won't be any good now, they go off after twelve months and since nobody's actually been manufacturing antibiotics for the past decade I doubt-no dad, you should probably just throw them away."
I confided in you the next day at school. I was not used to sharing my many and varied worries, but perhaps some small part of me still believed you had the power to stop things, although I had stopped believing in all other kinds of magic long before that.
At break time we used to sit around at the edges of the playground, where the greying tarmac hadn't yet been replaced by that reinforced artificial grass stuff which was supposed to be safer and more calming. We were both quiet children. Sometimes we would sit for the whole period without talking. Rarely, we would sneak off to play pretend games, and live in one of our secret worlds for an hour, but that was only if we could do it somewhere other children couldn't work out what we were doing. The art of play, sadly, was lost to most children our age. Perhaps that is why we found each other.
That day, there was no room to escape. Had it been summer, and we with the whole sports field on which to stage our shared fantasies, perhaps we would have played "nuclear bunker", and acted out stashing our loved ones and toys into a subterranean palace. Instead I told you about the worries I was having. I didn't want to die from a bomb. I couldn't bear the thought of everything being black forever. I wanted to keep my soft toys in a box by the door, in case we had to leave to go to a bunker, but then of course I wouldn't be able to keep them in my bed. It was a terrible dilemma.
You listened, smoothing down the little blue plaster on your knee. You had little to say, but later in the afternoon, whilst I sat amongst the red and yellow cushions in the Reading Corner, you came and pushed a little pile of books into my hands. The History of the Atom. Children's Questions about War. Children of Hiroshima.
"I saw these in the library," you said.
I looked at them carefully. The History of the Atom had a little picture of a mushroom cloud on the front. "No thank you," I said. "I think these books might scare me too much."
Children aren't generally very good at disguising their expressions, but you seemed naturally calm. Being told "no" never seemed to embarrass you like it did me. "When I was little," you said, "I was scared of bumblebees. So my gran took me to the library and we found a book about bumblebees. And it told you all about how they make honey and how they die if they sting you, so they won't sting you unless you scare them. Did you know that bumblebees help trees make apples?"
It was more than you ever usually said. Surprised, I could only come back with mild skepticism. "Just apples?"
"And other fruits." You nodded authoritatively. "Reading about things makes them less scary. Things are always less scary than you think they are."
It was true in this case, at least, although Children's Questions about War was the least reassuring.
"Many people have been hurt or killed in wars, and now governments all over the world are trying to stop wars from happening. The United Nations helps countries to make something called a peace treaty with each other. A peace treaty is an agreement to stop fighting. Sometimes a peace treaty also says which areas of land belong to which side. A peace treaty can take a long time to write, because countries often want different things."
Well, knock me down with a fucking feather. I am quoting from memory, obviously, but it was something similar. And even at that age, I was skeptical. What was the United Nations going to do, exactly, if the two countries in question didn't keep to their treaty?
I had more luck with the other two. Thinking about it, I was never entirely sure how Children of Hiroshima made it into our little library. Some of the pictures were quite upsetting. Then, at the end of the book, "Following the effects of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese government have made a promise never to produce, store, or use nuclear weapons."
Surely, after what happened to those babies and children, nobody would ever want to use those bombs ever again?
(That is one of many sad and wonderful things about being a child-you think nobody could ever imagine hurting a baby on purpose.)
The third one, History of the Atom, I did not have time to read before the end of the session, but thankfully they allowed us to take books home as long as we told the teacher we were doing it. I opened it in the car on the way home, and by dinnertime had to be pried away from it.
I am sure that every scientist can pinpoint the moment at which science began to make sense for them. For me, it was reading that book. Before, I had never really thought about what everyday things were made of-now, looking at that black-and-red diagram of an atom nucleus with electrons orbiting it like so many moons, I realised that there was a whole world beneath the limits of my vision that I had only just begun to understand.
And it made sense to me, Rebeca! By the time I went to sleep I had a very basic understanding of atomic numbers and why they mattered. It was like binary code for reality, the DNA of the world; both things I had known about but never before understood.
Anyway-we were talking about Hiroshima. Or I was. "We" no longer has any meaningful existence, where you have gone.
How depressing I am being! Rebeca, forgive me. Every time I come close to the subject of apocalypse I seem to veer away into meaningless introspection. You taught me the most fantastic word once-omphaloskepsis. From the Greek for, literally, "navel-gazing". Ostensibly an aid to certain kinds of yogic meditation; in practice, a fantastic way to describe people who love to talk about themselves.
Everything reminds me of you, that's the trouble. There is no part of life or history that you did not manage to touch at some point, no memory within me that does not bear your fingerprint, whether you were physically present or not. Perhaps in years to come people will say the same about me-but I am veering again. I find all meaning has come to tilt that way in recent years. It all comes down to you, and, in turn, to me.
Association drags us to that subject, so let us stop resisting for now. I am tired and do not want to talk about the end of the world any more. It feels too close to home.
There was a scare when we were seven or eight or so-I remember now. Some tiny-nation state waving its nukes at some other tiny nation-state, which would have been insignificant had America not taken sides. Suddenly we were all talking about World War III. I can see myself mulling in the kitchen of our old terraced house, worrying about what would happen to mum and dad and all my soft toys if a bomb fell, and mum's voice eking in from the dining room.
"Wasn't that all finished when we were kids? I thought they'd made up. I thought we'd moved on from A-bombs or H-bombs or whatever letter they're using now. No, dad, I don't know what the H stands for either. What? Well... biological warfare, I suppose. Viruses and things."
Silence. I thought about getting the flu from a bomb. It didn't seem as bad, so I thought I must have been getting it wrong.
"No-no dad, those won't be any good now, they go off after twelve months and since nobody's actually been manufacturing antibiotics for the past decade I doubt-no dad, you should probably just throw them away."
I confided in you the next day at school. I was not used to sharing my many and varied worries, but perhaps some small part of me still believed you had the power to stop things, although I had stopped believing in all other kinds of magic long before that.
At break time we used to sit around at the edges of the playground, where the greying tarmac hadn't yet been replaced by that reinforced artificial grass stuff which was supposed to be safer and more calming. We were both quiet children. Sometimes we would sit for the whole period without talking. Rarely, we would sneak off to play pretend games, and live in one of our secret worlds for an hour, but that was only if we could do it somewhere other children couldn't work out what we were doing. The art of play, sadly, was lost to most children our age. Perhaps that is why we found each other.
That day, there was no room to escape. Had it been summer, and we with the whole sports field on which to stage our shared fantasies, perhaps we would have played "nuclear bunker", and acted out stashing our loved ones and toys into a subterranean palace. Instead I told you about the worries I was having. I didn't want to die from a bomb. I couldn't bear the thought of everything being black forever. I wanted to keep my soft toys in a box by the door, in case we had to leave to go to a bunker, but then of course I wouldn't be able to keep them in my bed. It was a terrible dilemma.
You listened, smoothing down the little blue plaster on your knee. You had little to say, but later in the afternoon, whilst I sat amongst the red and yellow cushions in the Reading Corner, you came and pushed a little pile of books into my hands. The History of the Atom. Children's Questions about War. Children of Hiroshima.
"I saw these in the library," you said.
I looked at them carefully. The History of the Atom had a little picture of a mushroom cloud on the front. "No thank you," I said. "I think these books might scare me too much."
Children aren't generally very good at disguising their expressions, but you seemed naturally calm. Being told "no" never seemed to embarrass you like it did me. "When I was little," you said, "I was scared of bumblebees. So my gran took me to the library and we found a book about bumblebees. And it told you all about how they make honey and how they die if they sting you, so they won't sting you unless you scare them. Did you know that bumblebees help trees make apples?"
It was more than you ever usually said. Surprised, I could only come back with mild skepticism. "Just apples?"
"And other fruits." You nodded authoritatively. "Reading about things makes them less scary. Things are always less scary than you think they are."
It was true in this case, at least, although Children's Questions about War was the least reassuring.
"Many people have been hurt or killed in wars, and now governments all over the world are trying to stop wars from happening. The United Nations helps countries to make something called a peace treaty with each other. A peace treaty is an agreement to stop fighting. Sometimes a peace treaty also says which areas of land belong to which side. A peace treaty can take a long time to write, because countries often want different things."
Well, knock me down with a fucking feather. I am quoting from memory, obviously, but it was something similar. And even at that age, I was skeptical. What was the United Nations going to do, exactly, if the two countries in question didn't keep to their treaty?
I had more luck with the other two. Thinking about it, I was never entirely sure how Children of Hiroshima made it into our little library. Some of the pictures were quite upsetting. Then, at the end of the book, "Following the effects of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese government have made a promise never to produce, store, or use nuclear weapons."
Surely, after what happened to those babies and children, nobody would ever want to use those bombs ever again?
(That is one of many sad and wonderful things about being a child-you think nobody could ever imagine hurting a baby on purpose.)
The third one, History of the Atom, I did not have time to read before the end of the session, but thankfully they allowed us to take books home as long as we told the teacher we were doing it. I opened it in the car on the way home, and by dinnertime had to be pried away from it.
I am sure that every scientist can pinpoint the moment at which science began to make sense for them. For me, it was reading that book. Before, I had never really thought about what everyday things were made of-now, looking at that black-and-red diagram of an atom nucleus with electrons orbiting it like so many moons, I realised that there was a whole world beneath the limits of my vision that I had only just begun to understand.
And it made sense to me, Rebeca! By the time I went to sleep I had a very basic understanding of atomic numbers and why they mattered. It was like binary code for reality, the DNA of the world; both things I had known about but never before understood.