On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The light from that explosion was brighter than 25,000 suns. John Hershey wrote a book about that day. The book, titled Hiroshima, described the permanent shadows which were caused by the blast of that bomb. The heat from that burst of energy indelibly etched the shadows of objects and human beings upon the buildings and the roads of that place. When troops later entered that devastated city, they saw the shadow of a person who had been sitting on the steps of a bank, the shadow of a soldier unbuttoning his shirt, the shadow of a painter caught in the act of dipping his brush.

There are other shadows, too, which have an enduring quality. Shadows of personal influence remain permanently etched on human lives l…