291. A Sundering - Salman Rushdie
Carl Newman, City Scene via Smithsonian American Art Museum
We all have a picture of the world, an idea of what is real, inside which we live.
For many years now, I have taught a nonfiction graduate seminar at New York University. In several of the books we read and discuss, a common theme emerges. People in a peaceful community—often a remote, rural place—are suddenly confronted with a calamitous intervention into their lives. Two examples of this are Truman Capote’s true-crime novel In Cold Blood, and Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl. Capote has said that when he first read about the murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, a small town at or near the very center of the United States, he was more interested to discover the effects of the murders on the people of Holcomb than he was in the crimes themselves. Meanwhile Alexievich, for obvious reasons unable to examine the site of the exploded Chernobyl nuclear reactor itself, and unable to talk to all those first responders who died in the effort to shut it down and make it safe, talks instead to the survivors, and constructs the story of the horror through their traumatized voices.
Capote arrived in Holcomb, accompanied by his childhood friend Harper Lee, to find a community mired in mutual suspicion. Until the arrest of the actual killers, who were strangers from far away in search of money, the townspeople of Holcomb mostly assumed that the murderer was one of them. They began to eye one another with distrust and even fear. Some Holcomb people moved away. The town no longer felt safe.
The Chernobyl survivors found themselves treated with fear by their fellow countrymen, much as the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs had been treated in Japan. People didn’t want to come near them, let alone marry them or bear their children. And many of them decided that the only way forward for them was to return to their homes near the reactor, knowing full well that radioactivity levels in the region were off the charts, so they would be drastically shortening their own lives by going back.
We all have a picture of the world, an idea of what is real, inside which we live. Sudden disaster—the death of a loved one, the loss of a vital job, a murder, a meltdown at a nearby nuclear reactor—breaks that picture and we have to try to reconstruct it, or something like it, or something completely different.
I myself have had such an experience, when I was attacked by a man with a knife in August 2022 and almost killed. It has taken me a year and a half to deal with the physical and psychological consequences of that attack, and perhaps I haven’t fully dealt with it even now.
- Salman Rushdie
