| Sarah Ditum | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
One of the workers inside the Fukushima nuclear power station has reportedly sent a message to his family. It says: "Live well. I cannot be home for a while." The "Fukushima 50" are, by any definition, heroic – risking their lives to protect others. And in the middle of a greater work than most of us will (hopefully) be called on to do, this man is thinking about home.
That feels poignant. Bathetic, even. After all, we usually think of heroism as being distinct from normality, as extraordinary. We do the same when we decide what is valuable in our culture, often picking out the rare and remarkable as the most precious, to looking to symphonies, great paintings or magnificent buildings as evidence of the excellence of our species.
But when absolute disaster comes, it is made abruptly clear how much more the banal and the homely can matter than any of these totems to cultural greatness. The images of ruined domesticity are the most painfully affecting: family photos covered in filth and separated from the people they belong to, the mystifying appearance of a man with a bike in the middle of collapsed streets, the awful incongruity of a stained Miffy toy sitting among rubble and trash.
The cynical response to these pictures would be to say that they show us how puny human lives are. Even if the owners are still alive, can they care about such detritus in a time of mass tragedy? We are a fragile species, obsessed with ephemera, these stills seem to whisper. It's comforting to tell ourselves that what's been lost was trivial anyway – but terribly wrong. This explosion of peoples' daily lives into the open shows us what our existence is actually made up of – not the dramatic and unusual, but the boring, the things that are as unremarkable and essential as air and water. (Speaking of which, images of people queueing to fill plastic bottles from pumps ought to tell us that a functioning water system is a more impressive feat of construction that any of the ancient follies people travel thousands of miles to gawk at.)
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