nine-month trip

Remain in love.

In the decades since, however, persons of great integrity and intellect have insisted on the intrinsic immorality of atomic weapons, in general, and the ignominy of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in particular. In 1956 the Oxford philosopher and Catholic thinker Elizabeth Anscombe made an enlightening comparison that threw into stark relief the horrors to which consequentialist reasoning leads when it is taken to its logical conclusion. Let us suppose, she said, that the Allies had thought at the beginning of 1945 that, in order to break the Germans’ will to resist and to compel them to surrender rapidly and unconditionally, thus sparing the lives of a great many Allied soldiers, it was necessary to carry out the massacre of hundreds of thousands of civilians, women and children included, in two cities in the Ruhr. Two questions arise. First, what difference would there have been, morally speaking, between this and what the Nazis did in Czechoslovakia and Poland? Second, what difference would there have been, morally speaking, between this and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

It’s scary to think that the person you’re meant to be with is out there, possibly on the other side of the world and there’s only a tiny chance that the two of you will meet in this life time.