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1、Unit 4 A View of MountainsJonathan Schell1. 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 reco
2、rd of nuclear destruction in existence. Hiroshima, destroyed three days earlier, had largely escaped the cameras 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 o
3、f a nuclear weapon only hours after it had been used. Some of Yamahatas 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
4、 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 stand
5、ing 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
6、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 destro
7、y Nagasaki with the worlds second atomic bomb, but it took fifty years for Yamahatas 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
8、-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 b
9、een 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 i
10、s 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
11、 that the second bomb originally was to be dropped on the city of Kokura, which was spared Nagasakis 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 photograph
12、y 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
13、 much the same.3. Yamahatas 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 ru
14、ined 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 Kok
15、ura? 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 co
16、ntinuation, 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
