My birth coincided with man’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This act of war effectively wiped out nearly a hundred thousand people and their environs in an instant, and gave rise to untold suffering and death to nearly that many in the months following.
You may think that an American child as young as five, benefitting from the peaceful years that ensued, would grow up in carefree happiness. But even then I had full knowledge of that crime against humanity. I was haunted in my dreams and bowed down by enormous grief during my waking hours. One of my friends, also a five-year-old Catholic, declared that he would become a priest. And he did.
But my path was different. I needed to find out WHY.
Why do we kill each other? What is it that we see in each other, or don’t see in each other, that makes us unable to simply let the other live?
Are we so different from each other at the very core? Can we not connect as fellow inhabitants of this one big boat called Planet Earth?
Where is the TRUTH? Can we see it, touch it, feel it? How can we know what is TRUTH? There are many different kind of people in this world. Can any two people experience the same TRUTH? Can we agree on this TRUTH?
And where is God in all of this? She sees it all play out, but why let us turn ourselves into monsters and barbarians? Does She not cry for every last one of us, both perpetrators and victims?
I devoted my life to pursuing the answers. I obtained a Ph.D in physics and learned how to build an atomic bomb. I learned how physicists think and learn and create and know what they know.
I hung out with writers and wrote poetry, reams of poetry, observing how a poem comes into being and seeing how poets think and learn and create and know what they know.
What is included in this volume is a selection of notes from this journey.