1、Unit 4A View of MountainsJonathan Schell1. On August 9, 1945, the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, YosukeYamahata, 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

2、 of nuclear destruction in existence. Hiroshima, destroyed three days earlier, had largely escaped the camera s lens in the first dayafter 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 populationof a

3、nuclear weapon only hours after it had been used. Some of Yamahata s picturesshow 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 standi

5、ng 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 b

6、ackground, 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

7、 Nagasaki with the world ssecond atomic bomb, but it took fifty years for Yamahata s pictures of the event tomake 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 be

9、en in the shadow of Hiroshima, as if the human imagination had stumbled to exhaustion inthe 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

10、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 t

11、hat the second bomb originally was to be dropped on the city of Kokura, which was spared Nagasaki s fate only because bad weather protected itfrom 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

12、center showing what soon could easily happen to New York. Wherever the exhibit might travel, moreover, the view of threatened future from these“ windows ” wouldbe roughly accurate, since, although every intact city is different from every other, all cities that suffer nuclear destruction will look m

13、uch 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 ruin

14、ed 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 droppedor perhaps the spared city of Kokura

15、? 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 conti

16、nuation, must remain incomplete. Only action can satisfy.4. Once, the arrival in the world of new generations took care of itself. Now, theycan 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 respons

17、ibilities of the generations now alive. The gift of time is the gift of life, forever, if we know how to receive it.望遠山喬納森謝爾1945 年 8 月 9 日，一顆原子彈投向長崎。當天，在日軍中服役的攝影師山端庸介被派遣到這座已遭毀滅的城市。 他第二天拍攝的百來張照片可謂現存最完整的核毀滅威力的影像 記錄。 此前 3 天也遭遇毀滅的廣島在轟炸的第一天基本沒被相機拍攝下來。 山端碰巧有條不紊地用偉大而簡潔的藝術手法記錄下了核武器爆炸后僅僅數小時對人類的影響。 山端的部分照片展示了

18、被核火球以其獨特的方式燒焦了的尸體。他們是被光燒焦的 用專業術語來說，他們是被 “熱脈沖 ”燒焦的 尸體通常都烙上了衣服的圖案，因為不同的顏色吸光程度不同。 一張照片拍下了一匹身形扭曲的馬兒蜷縮在它拉的大車下面。 另一張顯示了一堆懸掛在突出物上面伸進溝渠的東西， 看得出這也是一個人的遺骸。 第 3 張照片中有個小女孩站在防空洞入口處， 不知何故她雖經歷劫難卻毫發無傷。她臉上露出詭異的笑容，令人震撼。如果不是這張照片， 在我們現在見證的場景中， 原先的日常生活已一去不返。 大片茫茫的廢墟瓦礫一直伸向遠方，殘火零落其間，而這片景象的背景則是綿延的大山。我們能遙望遠山，正因為整個城市已化為焦土。 城

19、市的灰飛煙滅比斷壁殘垣更能說明問題的核心本質。 這一事件的真正效應不在于城市還剩下什么，而在于消失的一切。2 美國使用世界上第 2 顆原子彈將長崎夷為平地僅僅用了幾秒鐘，然而，山端拍攝這一事件的照片從長崎輾轉回到美國卻用了 50 年之久。照片第一次在美國展出是在1995 年，展出地點是紐約國際攝影中心。 遲到了半個世紀， 這些照片仍然帶有新聞效應。 這些照片展示的是單個城市的命運， 但卻帶有普遍意義， 因為在我們這個核武器時代， 發生在長崎身上的災難也可能在轉瞬之間發生在世界任何一個城市身上。通過這些照片，長崎為自己正名。它一直存在于廣島的陰影中， 因為似乎人類的想象力到達廣島這第一個被毀滅的城市的廢墟之后便裹足不前、消失殆盡了， 以至于連長崎的邊緣都到達不了。 然而，長崎的滅頂之災在某些方面恰恰是籠罩在我們頭頂上的核威脅陰云的更有力的象征。 它證明人類一旦大開核武器殺戒， 就會重蹈覆轍。 它帶來了系列破壞的概念， 就是說， 有成千上萬的核武器持續存在，我們每個人都有可能受到威脅。 （第 2 顆原子彈原定是投向小倉的， 只是后來因為天氣惡劣，空中視線不佳， 這才使小倉