There floated through my mind a line from the Bhagavad-Gita in which Krishna is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, he later recalled. First, of course, is the realization that war is about destruction. This destruction is not only physical, but moral, spiritual, or cultural, as suggested by the term worlds. The concern is not as much the destruction of the literal earth per se, but the destruction of consciousness. Additionally, it is telling that Oppenheimer reaches to literature to come to grips with the destructive force of which he is the author.
Literature has a particular power to comprehend worlds, as physics is able to comprehend the world.
If individual worlds were shattered by World War II, then these worlds needed to be rebuilt during the postwar period, and I want to suggest that literature played a vital role in this process. With the physical world still potentially endangered as the idea of nuclear war loomed overhead, literature had the responsibility of recreating moral, spiritual, and cultural worlds. The essential nature of this task, I believe, is clarified in the works of J.D. Salinger. His fiction concerns not only the individual s place in the community, sanctified children and angst-ridden adolescents, but the role of authorship and the creation of the stories themselves. I don't generally pass judgments like that, but I do have to say that Bridget Jones's Diary is smart and funny in most of the same ways.