Unit 4

A View of Mountains

Jonathan Schell

1.On August 9, 1945, the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Yosuke Yamahata, a

photographer serving in the Japanese army, was dispatched to the destroyed city. The hundred or so pictures he took the next day constitute the fullest photographic record of nuclear destruction in existence. Hiroshima, destroyed three days earlier, had largely escaped the camera’s lens in the first day after the bombing. It was therefore left to Yamahata to record, methodically －and, as it happens, with a great and simple artistry – the effects on a human population of a nuclear weapon only hours after it had been used. Some of Yamahata’s pictures show corpses charred in the peculiar way in which a nuclear fireball chars its victims. They have been burned by light –technically speaking, by the “thermal pulse” －and their bodies are often branded with the patterns of their clothes, whose colors absorb light in different degrees. One photograph shows a horse twisted under the cart it had been pulling. Another shows a heap of something that once had been a human being hanging over a ledge into a ditch. A third shows a girl who has somehow survived unwounded standing in the open mouth of a bomb shelter and smiling an unearthly smile, shocking us with the sight of ordinary life, which otherwise seems to have been left behind for good in the scenes we are witnessing. Stretching into the distance on all sides are fields of rubble dotted with fires, and, in the background, a view of mountains. We can see the mountains because the city is gone. That absence, even more than wreckage, contains the heart of the matter. The true measure of the event lies not in what remains but in all that has disappeared.

2.It took a few seconds for the United States to destroy Nagasaki with the wo rld’s second atomic

bomb, but it took fifty years for Yamahata’s pictures of the event to make the journey back from Nagasaki to the United States. They were shown for the first time in this country in 1995, at the International Center for Photography in New York. Arriving a half-century late, they are still news.

The photographs display the fate of a single city, but their meaning is universal, since, in our age of nuclear arms, what happened to Nagasaki can, in a flash, happen to any city in the world. In the photographs, Nagasaki comes into its own. Nagasaki has always been in the shadow of Hiroshima, as if the human imagination had stumbled to exhaustion in the wreckage of the first ruined city without reaching even the outskirts of the second. Yet the bombing of Nagasaki is in certain respects the fitter symbol of the nuclear danger that still hangs over us. It is proof that, having once used nuclear weapons, we can use them again. It introduces the idea of a series －the series that, with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons remaining in existence, continues to threaten everyone. (The unpredictable, open-ended character of the series is suggested by the fact that the second bomb

originally was to be dropped on the city of Kokura, which was spared Nagasak i’s fate only because bad weather protected it from view.) Each picture therefore seemed not so much an image of something that happened a half-century ago as a window cut into the wall of the photography center showing what soon could easily happen to New York. Wherever the exhibit might travel, moreover, the view of threatened future from these “windows” would be roughly accurate, since, although every intact city is different from every other, all cities that suffer nuclear destruction will look much the same.

3.Yamahata’s pictures afford a glimpse of the end of the world. Yet in our day, when the challenge

is not just to apprehend the nuclear peril but to seize a God-given opportunity to dispel it once and for all, we seem to need, in addition, some other picture to counterpoise against ruined Nagasaki －one showing not what we would lose through our failure but what we would gain by our success. What might that picture be, though? How do you show the opposite of the end of the world? Should it be Nagasaki, intact and alive, before the bomb was dropped －or perhaps the spared city of Kokura?

Should it be a child, or a mother and child, or perhaps the Earth itself? None seems adequate, for how can we give a definite form to that which can assume infinite forms, namely, the lives of all human beings, now and in the future? Imagination, faced with either the end of the world or its continuation, must remain incomplete. Only action can satisfy.

4.Once, the arrival in the world of new generations took care of itself. Now, they can come into

existence only if, through an act of faith and collective will, we ensure their right to exist. Performing that act is the greatest of the responsibilities of the generations now alive. The gift of time is the gift of life, forever, if we know how to receive it.

望远山

乔纳森·谢尔

1 1945年8月9日，一颗原子弹投向长崎。当天，在日军中服役的摄影师山端庸介被派遣到这座已遭毁灭的城市。他第二天拍摄的百来张照片可谓现存最完整的核毁灭威力的影像记录。此前3天也遭遇毁灭的广岛在轰炸的第一天基本没被相机拍摄下来。山端碰巧有条不紊地用伟大而简洁的艺术手法记录下了核武器爆炸后仅仅数小时对人类的影响。山端的部分照片展示了被核火球以其独特的方式烧焦了的尸体。他们是被光烧焦的——用专业术语来说，他们是被“热脉冲”烧焦的——尸体通常都烙上了衣服的图案，因为不同的颜色吸光程度不同。一张照片拍下了一匹身形扭曲的马儿蜷缩在它拉的大车下面。另一张显示了一堆悬挂在突出物上面伸进沟渠的东西，看得出这也是一个人的遗 …… 此处隐藏：4505字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……