Yesterday, I wandered the streets of Pompeii, where, starting on August 24, 79 c.e., the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius killed the inhabitants of the city and buried the place in 5 or 6 meters of ash. The end came quickly: when the site was excavated centuries later, finds included the remains of mules still in harness grinding grain. The city was interrupted when death swept down from the mountain.By coincidence, yesterday was also the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, where the United States demonstrated in 1945 that Hiroshima was not a fluke, but a horrific capability that the US was prepared to use until Japan surrendered. 70-75,000 died in Nagasaki, killed by a weapon of a sort that cannot be used near population centers discriminately, that is, in a way that targets combatants and avoids harm to non-combatants, in keeping with the tenets of just war. As I wandered Pompeii, Nagasaki haunted me.I havent been to the A-bomb sites, where the victims are memorialized and the damage is documented. Nagasaki is again a bustling city marked by a somber memorial to a disaster, Nagasaki International Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims, next to the museum of the bombing. Theres a modern city at Pompeii, but the ghost town of the original obliterated city is what catches the imagination. In Pompeii, heaps of volcanic ash preserved lovely paintings, careful tile-work, beautifully-built houses, baths and lunch-counters, lovingly planted vineyards, and all the stuff of ordinary life two millennia ago. The citizens had been working hard to overcome the wreckage from earthquakes in 62 and 63. A few skeletons remain at the site, but most evidence of the human carnage has been carefully removed in order that the site recall Pompeiis life, not its sudden end. Pompei Viva, as the sign says.The two interrupted cities are different in many many ways, of course. Pompeii was the victim of a natural force, while the bombing of Nagasake was a considered decision. Time, culture, and after-effects are dramatically distinctNagasake did rebuild, while the original Pompeii lives on as an archeological dig and tourist site. Nagasake, like Hiroshima, draws pilgrims. Pilgrims at Pompeii are likely to be those visiting a place sacred for its archeological and historical meaning, not for the darker sadness of the deliberate slaughter of the bomb. What causes me to wonder, though, to imagine and to try to cherish, are the missing peoplethe ordinary folks who got up that morning to go to work, or to school, or to shop. They might have been thinking about finding a new job, about dinner that night, about a love-affair, about an incipient head-cold, or any the minutiae that mark quotidian human living, at least until ones city is interrupted. That, I suspect, is the matter of our human community, the common matter of life that is the locus of its holiness and its preciousness. I pray for the missing peopleand that humans never again choose something so awful as to interrupt a city.

Lisa Fullam is professor of moral theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. She is the author of The Virtue of Humility: A Thomistic Apologetic (Edwin Mellen Press).

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