A Song for Nagasaki Quotes

“Unless you have suffered and wept, you really don’t understand what compassion is, nor can you give comfort to someone who is suffering. If you haven’t cried, you can’t dry another’s eyes. Unless you’ve walked in darkness, you can’t help wanderers find the way. Unless you’ve looked into the eyes of menacing death and felt its hot breath, you can’t help another rise from the dead and taste anew the joy of being alive.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“Suffering, gracefully accepted, refines the human heart, and the experience of darkness sharpens the vision of the spirit.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“Assistance is authentic, he jotted down in his journal, when it helps restore a person’s dignity.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“After the carnage, smoke and ash of the last few days, the mountains never looked so beautiful or dependable. That Chinese poet had expressed it well: ‘Though the nation go under, the mountains and streams remain.’ Though men explode atom bombs, God’s sunlight never fails.

Scientist Nagai corrected that thought: ‘The sun’s fuel is already half spent, and one day sunlight will disappear and the green mountains around me will die, just as surely as my wife died and my books and medals turned to ash.’ His copy of the New Testament had also turned to ash, but as he walked, a verse from it took hold of his heart: ‘The heavens and the earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.’ There it was, the truth more reliable than mountains and sunlight, and the answer to the horror and sadness of August 9th.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“You best meet the Supernatural if you make your heart like a hut that is empty of everything but the bare essentials.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“Bamboo and pine denote endurance and fidelity. No matter how cold the winter or how torrid the summer, they remain green and vigorous.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“Nagai possessed a strong sense of responsibility toward those who have gone before, bequeathing us our culture and civilization, and toward those who will follow us, to whom we must have on what we have both received and worked to improve. This sense of duty sprang from a real love for and loyalty toward the human race.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“God has never said you have to perform great deeds for your country and humanity to have lived well. Where would that leave all the sick people in the world? Look at me, for instance, needing to be assisted all the time. You wouldn't say that we sick and bedridden of the world are 'useful'! But usefulness is not the point. Our lives are of great worth if we accept with good grace the situation Providence places us in and go on living lovingly. A sick person who has grasped this will live so full a life that there will be no room for morbid death wishes.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“I could be cured miraculously of leukemia, and that would be good. If I’m not cured, that’s good too, and it won’t bother me a scrap. All that I am concerned about is what his plans are for me; the only life that interests me is one lived for Him … one day at a time, supported by prayer.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“Midori turned her head and spoke quietly with composure. ‘We said before we married, and before you went to China the second time, that if our lives are spent for the glory of God, then life and death are beautiful. You have given everything you had for work and that was very important. It was for His glory.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“Before leaving, he turned and gazed at the x-ray machine that had sown seeds of death in his blood, and he became calmer. The machine was no longer the new shiny thing Professor Suetsugu had brought. It had paint chipped off here and was worn there, just like Nagai. Was not that the best way to end up, worn out in the service of your fellow men? Nagai realized he was no longer trembling. Peace had returned and even a sense of gratitude for a full life.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“The ideal Japanese woman was to be like the bamboo, graceful, gentle, sensitive, and strong. The slightest wind will stir the bamboo’s filigree leaves, but autumn typhoons will not uproot it. Though giant cedar and cypress lie uprooted after a storm has passed, the slender bamboo stands serene.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“Nagai thought that Japanese owed their strong feeling for beauty to their mothers. As girls, whether they came from wealthy homes or poor ones, they had all been trained in Japan’s thousand-year-old tradition of feminine refinement and grace. Learning that tradition was regarded as one of the essential preparations for marriage and was the reason why every town and village had flourishing classes in ikebana, or flower arrangement, and cha no yu, or tea ceremony. His thoughts winged back to his own mother. Everything she did, from the way she served common green tea at a meal to her bows of welcome and farewell to patients and callers, was done with grace. To Nagai, it was obvious that the mother was the central figure in Japanese life.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“The cherry blossoms were bewitching when they suddenly appeared on dark leafless limbs, drawing immense crowds for hanami, flower viewing. But within three days, the delicate petals lie on roads and footpaths, and busy people walk roughshod over them.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“There are two false attitudes to reason, according to Pascal. One is overconfidence in reason, which often leads to barren scepticism. The other is resignation to stupidity coming from laziness or disinterest. Truth is reached by avoiding these two pitfalls. It requires hard work, but you are a deserter if you refuse to take the search. Human reason does not reach the highest objective reality, continued the Frenchman, but only the inferior scientific truths. The higher truths, utterly more important than mere scientific facts, are of the order of wisdom and are received rather than grasped. Unlike the rational truths of science, the higher truths are seen by the eyes of the heart. That expression was familiar to Nagai from Buddhism. Many images of Buddha show a jewel in his forehead, representing the eye of the heart, which sees beyond mere appearances. Pascal’s insistence on an order higher than reason was echoed in Buddhism’s Hanya, or Wisdom, sutra. ‘The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing,’ added the Frenchman.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“I rushed to her bedside. She was still breathing. She looked fixedly at me, and that’s how the end came. My mother in that last penetrating gaze knocked down the ideological framework I had constructed. This woman who had brought me into the world and reared me, this woman who had never once let up her love for me … in the very last moments of her life spoke clearly to me! Her eyes spoke to mine and with finality, saying: ‘Your mother now takes leave in death, but her living spirit will be beside her little one, Takashi.’ I who was so sure that there was no such thing as a spirit was now told otherwise and I could not but believe! My mother’s eyes told me that the human spirit lives on after death. All this was by way of intuition, an intuition carrying conviction.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“Takashi’s mother and father taught their small children spartan axioms of the samurai. There was, for instance, the famous Kei Setsu Ko. The sentence consists of just three ideographs, ‘firefly,’ ‘snow,’ and ‘success,’ and is an example of the one-line poems that the Chinese and Japanese love. The image evoked is of an impoverished scholar in a hut with no money to fuel lantern or buy a candle. His passion for study is so intense that each night he heaps snow by his desk and fills his room with netted fireflies. Their tiny glow and the moonlight reflected from the snow enable him to read his texts. Material poverty must never stop you.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“As an adult, Takashi said he never remembers his mother making him study. She allowed a love of learning to develop naturally in him.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“From an early age, eldest son Takashi was impressed by seeing his mother and father poring happily together over medical books. He remembers his father teaching her anatomy from sketches in a German medical book. The sight of his parents happily engrossed in books convinced young Takashi that study was as natural as pleasurable as eating. Later, writing as a research scholar in Nagasaki Medical University, he paid tribute to the ‘thatched-roof university’ of his childhood.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“The navel is the reminder that our body and our life are gifts from another. Nature has placed this sign in the very center of our bodies, where we cannot fail to see it. It is a symbol of the love, goodness and heroic sacrifices of our mothers. Nagai saw mothers as images of God and grace.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“experience of darkness sharpens the vision of the spirit. After meeting Keller and Miyagi, he wrote: “Unless you have suffered and wept, you really don’t understand what compassion is, nor can you give comfort to someone who is suffering. If you haven’t cried, you can’t dry another’s eyes. Unless you’ve walked in darkness, you can’t help wanderers find the way. Unless you’ve looked into the eyes of menacing death and felt its hot breath, you can’t help another rise from the dead and taste anew the joy of being alive.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“In the first decade of the eleventh century, the court lady Shikibu Murasaki wrote the nineteen-hundred-page Tale of Genji, a classic in world literature and called the first great novel since Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. This early and widespread phenomenon of feminine literature created clear-cut ideals of womanly grace for the upper classes.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“Those words in the Sermon on the Mount ‘blessed are those who weep’ should be taken literally by doctors. A real doctor suffers with each patient. If the patient is frightened of dying, so is the doctor. When the patient at long last gets well and says, ‘Thank you’, the doctor responds, ‘Thank you.’ If your patient is an old man, you treat him as your own father; if the patient is a child, as your own child. . . . Each patient becomes your brother, your sister, your mother, for whom you drop everything else. You anxiously reexamine those tests and x-rays, you pore over the medical chart, leaving no stone unturned. . . . How mistaken I was as a young doctor when I thought medical practice was a matter of medical technique. That would make a doctor a body mechanic! No, a doctor must be a person who feels in his own body and spirit all that the patient suffers in body and spirit. . . . I’ve come to understand that medicine is a vocation, a personal call from God—which means that examining a patient, taking an x-ray or giving an injection is part of the kingdom of God. When I realized that, I found myself praying for each patient I treated.” Like”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“There are some people who write haiku poetry to make a living. You know what I think? We should make our living become haiku poetry.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“It seemed to them that the cathedral had risen from the ashes to herald Christ’s birth. They listened in awe like the shepherds when singing came from the dark sky above Bethlehem. That night the title of Nagai’s book was born—The Bells of Nagasaki. Its message would be that not even an A-bomb can silence the bells of God.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“Happy are those who weep; they shall be comforted. We must walk the way of reparation. . . ridiculed, whipped, punished for our crimes, sweaty and bloody. But we can turn our minds’ eyes to Jesus carrying his Cross up the hill of Calvary. . . . The Lord has given; the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Let us be thankful that Nagasaki was chosen for the whole burnt sacrifice! Let us be thankful that through this sacrifice, peace was granted to the world and religious freedom to Japan.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“In May 1941 he was arrested and became Number 16670 in Auschwitz. In July, when a prisoner escaped, Commandant Fritsch lined up the whole block and chose ten prisoners at random to be executed in retaliation for the escapee. They were ordered into a bunker to be left without food or water until they “dried up like tulip bulbs”, as Fritsch put it. Sergeant Francis Gajowniczek was one of the doomed men and muttered, to no one in particular: “My poor wife and children.” Kolbe stepped forward, said he had no family and asked to take the sergeant’s place. Kolbe and the other nine were incarcerated on July 31, and by August 14 all had died except Kolbe and three other unconscious prisoners. An orderly was sent to finish them off with an injection of carbolic acid.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“Nagai credited Father Kolbe with his recovery. Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan who came to Japan in 1930. He founded a monastery in Nagasaki and built behind it a Lourdes grotto that has now become a national place of pilgrimage. The Marian monthly he started was still Catholic Japan’s most-read magazine. Nagai knew him well and on one occasion x-rayed him for tuberculosis. In 1936 Kolbe was recalled to Poland as prior of a very large monastery. Under him, the monastery began putting out Catholic newspapers that sold millions of copies weekly.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“He asked for a brush and Chinese ink for his jisei no uta, the traditional farewell song. From ancient times, in the code of bushido, the true samurai dies calm and self-possessed, leaving a farewell poem for his family and friends, often saluting the beauties of nature around him.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“His copy of the New Testament had also turned to ash, but as he walked, a verse from it took hold of his heart: “ The heavens and the earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” There it was, the truth more reliable than mountains and sunlight and the answer to the horror and sadness of August 9!”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb