‘We Are to Exist, Not to Live’

I grew up in a leper colony, in one of the Western world’s last remaining refuges for victims of a very curious disease. Leprosy is an affliction that is almost completely removed from any contemporary context, and yet it remains to this day a potent representation of body horror, social ostracization, and biblical symbology.

I never considered my upbringing unusual because, like all children everywhere and in every time, I simply accepted the circumstances into which I was born. I possessed neither the urge nor the capacity to speculate about alternative ways of life. My primitive little settlement of Sinegorskiy in far southwestern Russia was all I knew of the world and all, at the time, I could ever hope to know. “Hope” being perhaps not quite the right word here, because it never occurred to me, or to anyone in Sinegorskiy for that matter, that we could wish for anything else in life any more than a fish in a fishbowl can yearn for the unknown ocean.