The photographer, Eiichi Matsumoto, had covered the firebombings of other Japanese cities. But the scale of the calamity that he encountered in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he later recalled, was on another level.
At a Red Cross hospital near Hiroshima’s ground zero, he met victims dotted with red spots, a sign of radiation sickness. And on the desolate, rubble-strewn streets of Nagasaki, he watched families cremating loved ones in open-air fires.
“I beg you to allow me to take pictures of your utmost sufferings,” Mr. Matsumoto, who was 30 at the time, said he told survivors. “I am determined to let people in this world know without speaking a word what kind of apocalyptic tragedies you have gone through.”
So we appeal to the power of literature, a refuge we turn to when forced to confront contradictions that lie beyond reason or theory. Through the language of literature, we can finally come to empathize with the suffering of nameless and unknown others. Or, at very least, we can force ourselves to stare without flinching at the stupidity of those who have committed unforgivable errors and ask ourselves whether the shadow of this same folly lurks within us as well.
But apparently Mr. Ngiam (or Wen, or Yen, depending on transliteration) did not write down the ingredients for his immediately popular cocktail, leaving its interpretation largely up to the imagination of the thirsty. Like an urban legend, or the epic poem “Beowulf,” the Singapore Sling survives by oral tradition and collective memory, and modern versions might in no way resemble the original.
Yet harris is an expert practitioner and guide; we are always in her orbit, captivated as she manipulates language, un-doing worn traditions, engaging the reader intimately, and unforgettably.
On Christmas Day 1170, Thomas Becket delivered a sermon to a packed chapter house at Canterbury. His theme was the death of one his predecessors as archbishop, St Alphege, hacked to death by the Danes in the early 11th century – the only martyr in the role so far. “There will soon be another,” Becket declared. Four days later, a quartet of knights arrived drunk, on a perceived mission from the king, and dashed the archbishop’s brains across the cathedral floor. It is easy to see how, knowing his time was up, Becket might identify with Alphege. In The Book in the Cathedral, however, Christopher de Hamel argues that the two had something more tangible in common: an elaborately jewelled psalter – a book of psalms – once owned by Alphege and later treasured by Becket.
— i want to speak of unity that
indescribable thing
we have been speaking of since ’67 when I first stepped
into LA