A hundred pages into Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, Bobby Western sits in a church pew. He’s thinking about his father, a nuclear physicist who worked on the atomic bomb. In fact, he beheld “Trinity” with Oppenheimer et al., in goggles and gloves “like welders,” their colleague Teller “passing around suntan lotion.” Together, they watched something irrevocable being test-run, the prologue to Hiroshima, Nagasaki. McCarthy writes, pace Adorno:
In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years.
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