When she read about the atomic bombings, she gasped at the number of people who suddenly found themselves spirited—like the pictures she’d seen from Pompeii: casts of men and women holding one another, or frozen mid-crawl. What did they all do, suddenly, without their lives? Nothing, perhaps. They drifted and cried, not yet realizing they could be done crying. Or they drifted and waited for bearings, not yet realizing that bearings didn’t matter anymore.
