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Adalbert is a forum for me, to post ephemera, photography, poetry, occasional travel notes, and various spontaneous motions. Cover photo: Parsonage where my great-grandfather spent his early years. Taken near Liegnitz, Silesia, ca. 1870. The "xothique" portion of the web address is a nod to Clark Ashton Smith's fictional continent of Zothique.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Manhattan Project


Gurdjieff country over there in the Caucasus is certainly cooking...


August 6: the date on which Hiroshima was bombed. I once read a diary my grandfather kept ( unfortunately, the diary seems to have disappeared, probably lost during one of my father's moves). In August 1945 there was an entry stating simply "The US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, today." (Or something like that). That was it -- no reflection or commentary. There were long gaps between entries, sometimes several months or even years.


Once I met a Japanese guy, who, when I asked him where he was from, replied, "Hiroshima -- you know, A-bomb!" Point your attention to the elephant in the room right away...


Dream of watering intricate parterres at my old house...

1 comment:

  1. Just finished watching Letters from Iwo Jima on a DVD I actually purchased. The film was good and the extras were interesting. I did not know that many of today's generation of Japanese (and maybe a prior one also) never learned about the their part in the war. This Clint Eastwood film is like a revelation/education to them. Japanese government conveniently bypassed history/reality and only now is their citizenry coming to grips with it.

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