You read the following from Alexievich’s Chernobyl book of monologues in Singapore as it happened. A cameraman who was sent to the Zone soon after the explosion found it difficult to know where to turn his camera. Brought up on war film heroics, the man was lost in the Zone. What to capture? He began filming apple blossom and the circling bees, “everything in bridal white,” until the realization struck that he had lost all sense of smell, as had all the others. All the volunteers and even the dragooned became imbued with a sense of heroic duty. The earlier generation had survived the war and triumphed: Chernobyl was now their test in turn. “Otherwise we’d never become real people.”
The following two sentence paragraph read in Singapore where the selfie ruled supreme and in the airconned eateries plates of food drew the loving lens. (Was Melbourne even in the first half of 2011 anything like? The virus only of the last five and one half years and nothing more?)
“That’s how we’re made." (The heroic Russian soul &etc.) "If we just work each day and eat well—that would be strange and intolerable.”
Voices From Chernobyl, Svetlana Alexievich p. 109
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