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The past is always most clearly seen by those who never saw it.
Bomb away!’ said Thomas Ferebee at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945, releasing a lever 31,000 feet over Hiroshima. The B-29’s bomb bay doors fell open and an atom bomb codenamed Little Boy dropped out of its belly, triggering an intricate sequence of successive tripwires, electrical plugs, timers, barometric fuses and altimeters. Forty-three seconds later, at 1900 feet above ground level, a final circuit closed and four silk powder bags each containing two pounds of cordite were detonated by a tiny explosion that in turn initiated the largest man-made explosion in human history. And then the four silk powder bags were no more than vapour and energy along with the 60,000 Japanese souls ascending with them to heaven. That’s life.
No one agrees, no one knows, and all that can be said with absolute certainty is that soaring as pure energy and vaporised fragments towards the heavens that morning amidst animals, buildings, road signs, carts, cars, trams, so many numberless human beings and so much assorted detritus of daily living were four silk powder bags
Chekhov believed that the role of literature was not to provide answers but only to ask the necessary questions
Experience is but a moment. Making sense of that moment is a life.
Life is always happening and has happened and will happen, and the only writing that can have any worth confounds time and stands outside of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep within it, seeking the answer to one insistent question: who loves longer?
Many years later, when I went to Oxford, I studied history, an idea of time formed over 3000 years of human experience in Europe, which, I discovered, made perfect sense of European time, stopping at all stations of European progress and European thought. It was a straight railway line that perfectly mirrored an experience that became an idea, and an idea that became experience, and an experience that became European thought and then the European novel. But it made no sense of Tasmania.