Monster cloud rising over Hiroshima, over the world — monstrous, mushrooming thing, sign of our age, symbol of our sin: growth, bigness, speed: grow, grow, grow — grow in a cancer, enlarge a factory, swell a city, balloon our bellies, speed life, fly to the moon, burst a bomb, shatter a people — explode the world. So it rose and I shrank in my cot, I who had cringed before the body-squeezing blast of a five-hundred-pound bomb, hearing now this strange cold incomprehensible jargon of the megaton. Someone had sinned against life, and I felt it in my very person.
