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Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings—why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope that behind it we will find the truth of why. But there is no truth. There is only why. And when we look closer we see that behind that why is just another tapestry.
the need to forget is as strong as the need to remember. Perhaps stronger. And after oblivion? We return to the stories we call our memories, perplexed, strangers to the ongoing invention that is our life.
Earlier that day I had met local, elderly villagers who had been children during the war. I had not wanted to meet them. I felt—how can I put this?—ashamed. My shame was perhaps that my return might be misunderstood as vengeance or anger. But I didn’t know what my return was.
Maybe I was ashamed, somehow, of being my father’s son presuming that his and their history might also be mine. I worried I might be seen as an unwelcome ghost, a spectre looking over the scene of an unsolved crime in which I was implicated. But the ghost of whom?—the murdered, the murderer or the witness, or all three?
I learnt to look out for evidence of old surveys from many decades before—collapsing stone cairns, rotting pegs, or the vulva form of bark on old eucalyptus trees. With the axe I would carefully scarf away the bark until what was revealed was a deep prism-shaped cavity skilfully hewed into the tree trunk long ago, sometimes over a century before. The apex of the inverted prism was the survey point. I would stare at the marvel of that unaltered wound, the exact same as the day it was hewed by another axe. Time hadn’t healed the tree, only scarred it, hiding something that was still happening.
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I would stare at the marvel of that unaltered wound, the exact same as the day it was hewed by another axe. Time hadn’t healed the tree, only scarred it, hiding something that was still happening. For beneath the scar the wound remained, a portal to the past bleeding fresh sap in the present, into which, if I stared for too long, I would feel myself falling.
If Mr. Sato, who seemed a decent man, was capable of being a guard, doing evil or just standing by when evil was done, would I be any different? Would I too join in beating the prisoners, even though I didn’t wish to, would I too order a naked man to freeze to death kneeling in the falling snow, because it was what was expected, because it was too hard to say no? Or would I look away and choose not to help him?
What had happened? To this day I have no idea. There is no why.
Is it because we see our world only darkly that we surround ourselves with lies we call time, history, reality, memory, detail, facts? What if time were plural and so were we? What if we discovered we begin tomorrow and we died yesterday, that we were born out of the deaths of others and life is breathed into us from stories we invent out of songs, collages of jokes and riddles and other fragments?
The past is always most clearly seen by those who never saw it.
When the lives of ordinary Japanese meant so little to their leaders it is no surprise that the lives of their enemy were meaningless: the Japanese were ready to massacre the 32,000 POW slave labourers in Japan when the invasion began.
That night it began to rain heavily, the sort of rain that seems weighted with coins when you are compelled to move through it, making any room you enter feel light.
It could be argued that science was inexorably heading towards the discovery of nuclear fission and therefore the invention of the atomic bomb and thus Hiroshima. But nothing is ever inevitable, least of all the atomic bomb in the mid-twentieth century, a project which, as one of its key theorists, Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, noted, would only happen if someone could turn a country into a single workshop devoted to that task.
In recent times we have become prisoners of the idea that life is infinitely measurable, that all human wanting and torment and laughter, all hate and all love, can be reduced to that contemporary word metrics. That there is, in other words, an answer for all things that can be found in numbers.
Chekhov believed that the role of literature was not to provide answers but only to ask the necessary questions.
Like so much of what Chekhov wrote, question 7 is about how the world from which we presume to derive meaning and purpose is not the true world. It is a surface world, a superficial world, a frozen world of appearances, beneath which an entirely different world surges as if a wild river that at any moment might drown us.
Experience is but a moment. Making sense of that moment is a life.
At the heart of his gentleness was the feeling that without kindness we are nothing. Kindness and courage: with him the two seemed synonyms.
Near the end of his time, my father, who liked keeping some cash at hand in an envelope in his desk drawer, realised money was routinely going missing. He suspected a young woman who came to clean. Believing she had more need of it than him, he made no attempt to hide the envelope and once a week had my sister refresh its contents.
My father liked folly and fancy. What he could not tolerate was when they were conflated with life.
War, my father told me decades later, is the ultimate obscenity.
Of the many necessary illusions that enable a writer to write, two are paramount—one, the vanity they can write a good book, and the other the conceit that a good book will be read by good readers, people with the insight to recognise what is good within it. But, of course, good readers are as rare as good writers, perhaps even rarer, and most books in consequence find only poor readers. Writers rail against misunderstanding, but poor writers prosper by being misunderstood, some even accidentally elevated into the pantheon of greatness in consequence, the bad clay of their work forever after
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In a similar way my father blessed every court report and obituary notice with the weight of a remarkable life, finding unexpected depths and breadths in the thinnest journalese and kitschest sentiment, the words nothing, the drift of them everything. His kitchen filled daily with insights that belonged to an order other than that of the rags he read. He told one of my brothers that a single In Memoriam column could contain purer feeling than a book of poetry. He didn’t need literature to essay the universe. His mind only needed the smallest spark.
Wells imagined the atomic bomb as an infinitely more destructive force than conventional explosives, a weapon so powerful that a man “could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city.” The idea had been vaguely mooted by a few scientists but it was Wells who first foresaw the monstrous reality and consequences clearly and in detail.
Fiction may be only fancy yet reality is often no more than the enthusiastic answer we give to our dreams and nightmares.
The past then was different than the past is now; further away and harder to find, it receded more quickly and was little recorded in comparison to today, existing only in archives far away or sometimes not at all. People died younger and memory struggled to see over the great embankments of history—the war, the Depression, the Great War.
My father remembered how the coming of electric light killed ghost stories.
All words are at best transitory and soon enough become archaic, ceasing to belong to language at all and instead becoming the property of data sets that after a further time return only dead URL links, so many 404 errors.
There was a great remembering that was also a great forgetting, one hundred years of silence that sounded like a scream the closer you listened.
My mother and my father—how much I don’t know about them. How much is forever closed to my curiosity, how limited, in any case, is my curiosity. About their secret lives I see not so much closed doors as a child’s reticence to open another.
he had experienced that strange excitement of a reader who has accidentally stumbled into what feels like the deeper, private recesses of a favoured author’s mind, almost a frisson of intimacy.
For a great crime there should be a great criminal, not so many so small, so immemorable.
this is an account of memory, not fact, and facts are not how we know ourselves, while memory—its tricks, its evasions, its silences, its inventions, its inevitable questions—is who we become
at the beginning I learnt this: the words of a book are never the book, the soul of it is everything.
the words of a book are never the book, the soul of it is everything.
There was no straight line of history. There was only a circle.
At some point I came to understand that I wrote from the front lines of a war about which most have no idea. For a long time I could not understand that it was possible to be both on the side that has the power, that has unleashed the destruction, vast as it is indescribable, and, at the same time, be on the side that loses everything.
she and I both begin dissolving into the lengthening shadow thrown by the road cutting’s embankment in the late sun, both of us growing vaporous in our fallible labour of memory.
As you learn that you are written upon you learn to read people.
Nearing the end in her little room in the nursing home, I would often take my mother’s hand, pushing its leathery, crusty skin folds back and forth. I later wrote in a novel of a character who, similarly sitting next to their dying mother, finds some hand cream and rubs it into the back of her mother’s hand. I never did that. I made it up. I made it up regretting that so much of my thought had gone into my writing a novel about loving people around you and so little into loving the people around me. Maybe that’s what the past is. Making it up so we can keep moving along. Perhaps the past is
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There is no memory without shame.
None of this is an argument for the bombing of Hiroshima. All of it is an argument against war, an argument that can never be won but must never stop being made. Tragedy is sometimes understood as the conflict of one good against another. A more nuanced form of this idea is that tragedy is the conflict between what is perceived to be a lesser evil against what is perceived to be a greater evil. Tragedy exerts its hold upon our imaginations because it reminds us that justice is an illusion.
I realise writing this that memory is as much an act of creation as it is of testimony, and that one without the other is a tree without its trunk, wings without a bird, a book without its story.
I wrote a novel seeking to understand these things. To resolve them. For the time I spent writing it I felt that the writing was a way of divining the undivinable. Only when I finished I realised I understood nothing.
My father was ill, and I was with him early that morning. How’s the book going? he asked. I told him it was finally done. That night he died.
In the first chapter of The War of the Worlds, Wells makes the connection explicit—“Before we judge them [the Martians] too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”
“White Australians still struggle to come to terms with their colonial past,” the English Independent—a Martian newspaper—declared in 2009, its Harrow needles beginning their work, inescapable as a man trap, as if the genocide was our invention and not theirs, as though the totalitarian slave system was our choice and not their gulag. How marvellous, to have an empire, reap its robbed riches, and yet etch its colonial failings on the colonised, to write on our bodies that we were the vulgar arriviste, the barbarian, the savage, that their judgement was our crime.
No one noticed anything because no one any longer knew all that was irretrievably lost. No one saw that the paintings of Turner used a different palette for the sun to depict its original light in its lemon yellows and delicate hues of pink and coral in a time before that too was lost, refracted through the growing pollution into apocalyptic reds. A general numbness prevailed. The world there was grey, the world seemed petrified by its own collapse, at once dreary and dispirited, rectangle after warehouse after polytube, its cultivated and domesticated symmetries endless.
Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8:15 a.m. on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release
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