Art & Creativity Quote by Mordechai Vanunu

Isolation is supposed to shrink you. Vanunu describes a counter-move: using opera not as background entertainment, but as psychic engineering. The clunky, repetitive phrasing ("opera, opera") reads less like a polished reminiscence than like someone still inside the routine of coping, circling the same lifeline to make sure it holds. After five years, he says, he "started hearing" opera, as if the sound arrives like weather rather than a choice. That passivity is part of the point: in confinement, agency is rationed, so even receiving "tapes" becomes a negotiated form of freedom.

Opera is an unusually loaded refuge. It is maximalist art - huge voices, high stakes, bodies doing impossible things in public. For someone cut off from public speech (and, in Vanunu's case, punished for speaking), opera offers a vicarious return to volume, to consequence. When he says it made the spirit "very strong", he's not talking about inspiration in the soft sense; he's talking about endurance, the kind built by borrowing another person's lungs. "You feel like you are yourself singing" is the tell: the intent is self-expansion. He is rehearsing a self that cannot be reduced to prisoner, traitor, or headline.

The context matters: Vanunu is the Israeli nuclear technician turned whistleblower, then long-term solitary detainee. Opera here becomes a quiet rebuttal to the logic of incarceration. The state can control walls, schedules, visitors. It cannot easily police identification - that intimate act of climbing into someone else's voice and coming out, briefly, larger.