The Name of a City One heards the word and wants to know more, but one also wants to forget it. One has heard both too much and not enough about Hiroshima. For the city evokes our entire nuclear nightmare, and any study of it must behind with this symbolic evocation.

Its literal meaning, "broad island," suggests little more than the city's relationship to rivers and to the sea. Does one care about the literal meaning of Carthage, Troy, Sparta, Ch'ang An, Lidice, or Coventry? What Hiroshima does convey to us - indeed press upon us - is the realization that it actually happened and the implication that it could happen again. The mythological metaphors usually employed to suggest this idea - then genie let out of the bottle or Pandora's box opened - do not seem adequate for the phenomenon. That of man threatened by his Frankenstein comes closer, but this more recent myth, though technologically based, humanizes and keeps finite its monster. We need new myths to grasp our relationship to the cool ahuman, completely technological deity which began its destruction reign with Hiroshima. -Chapter One