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 world’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 Nagasaki’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骸。第3张照片中有个小女孩站在防空洞入口处，不知何故她虽经历劫难却毫发无伤。她脸上露出诡异的笑容，令人震撼。如果不是这张照片，在我们现在见证的场景中，原先的日常生活已一去不返。大片茫茫的废墟瓦砾一直伸向远方，残火零落其间，而这片景象的背景则是绵延的大山。我们能遥望远山，正因为整个城市已化为焦土。城市的灰飞烟灭比断壁残垣更能说明问题的核心本质。这一事件的真正效应不在于城市还剩下什么，而在于消失的一切。
2 美国使用世界上第2颗原子弹将长崎夷为平地仅仅用了几秒钟，然而，山端拍摄这一事件的照片从长崎辗转回到美国却用了50年之久。照片第一次在美国展出是在1995年，展出地点是纽约国际摄影中心。迟到了半个世纪，这些照片仍然带有新闻效应。这些照片展示的是单个城市的命运，但却带有普遍意义，因为在我们
这个核武器时代，发生在长崎身上的灾难也可能在转瞬之间发生在世界任何一个城市身上。通过这些照片，长崎为自己正名。它一直存在于广岛的阴影中，因为似乎人类的想象力到达广岛这第一个被毁灭的城市的废墟之后便裹足不前、消失殆尽了，以至于连长崎的边缘都到达不了。然而，长崎的灭顶之灾在某些方面恰恰是笼罩在我们头顶上的核威胁阴云的更有力的象征。它证明人类一旦大开核武器杀戒，就会重蹈覆辙。它带来了系列破坏的概念，就是说，有成千上万的核武器持续存在，我们每个人都有可能受到威胁。(第2颗原子弹原定是投向小仓的，只是后来因为天气恶劣，空中视线不佳，这才使小仓免遭长崎的厄运。这说明了核武器系列性威胁捉摸不定、难以预测的性质。)因此，与其说每张照片似乎记录了半个世纪之前发生的景象，还不如说它是嵌在摄影中心墙上的一扇窗户，透过它人们能看到也许很快就会轻而易举地发生在纽约的事情。而且，无论这些展品到达何方，这些“视窗”展示的遭受威胁的未来景象都大致准确，因为尽管每个完好无损的城市和其他城市都大不相同，任何遭遇核毁灭打击的城市面貌都将相差无几。
3 山端的照片使人们对世界末日可以管中窥豹。然而，在这个时代，我们的挑战不仅是认识核威胁的存在，还要抓住这个天赐良机彻底消灭核威胁。所以，除了这些照片，我们还需要其他照片来抵消遭受毁灭的长崎带来的负面感受；我们需要的照片所展示的不是我们通过失败会失去的事物，而是通过成功我们能得到的东西。但是，这该是什么样的照片？你如何展示和世界末日截然相反的另一面？是长崎在投弹前完好无缺、生机勃勃的照片吗？抑或是逃过一劫的小仓？或者是一个儿童，还是一位母亲和她的孩子，抑或是地球本身？没有一张能充分达到目的。原因是我们如何能以有限之形式来展现现在和将来气象万千的全人类生机无限的一个个鲜活生命？面对世界末日或世界未来，想象力的确力不从心。只有行动能令人满意。
4 过去，新生代降临人世乃自然而然之事。现在，他们只有依靠今人充满信仰的行动和集体意志才能到来，我们必须保障他们存在的权利。当今世人最重大的责任就是采取这样的行动。时间的礼物永远是生命的礼物，前提是我们必须懂得如何接受这样的礼物。