There Will Come Soft Rains
Yesterday, I reblogged this post, which is all about the extremely messed up (and well written, and thought provoking, and important for critical thought) stories that I and a lot of others remember reading in school.
It included links to all of them, so I re-read them, or read them for the first time, in a couple of cases. Yep. Still messed up. And important.
But one thing struck me about There Will Come Soft Rains, by Ray Bradbury. (Link included so you don't have to go to the first post to find it.) I remember reading it in school, of course, but back then I didn't notice something that really hit me when I read it yesterday. Well, I did read it in the late 90s, to be fair.
The third paragraph starts with the line "Today is August 4, 2026,"
This story was written in 1950, and I'm sure back then, 2026 felt like an incredibly distant year. And yet, me, reading this story again in 2026, I can only be grateful that the vision Mr. Bradbury had of this year didn't come to pass. Read the story- again, if necessary- and I won't spoil it for you, but it's bleak. (I wish I had an automatic breakfast maker like that described in the story, though.)
But yeah. August 2026 was 76 years in the future when the story was written, and is now just around the corner, but thankfully next year when kids read it in school, they'll be able to say that it's in the past.
Time passes, and time passes and time passes. And yet, life still exists, humans still get up and go to work and live (thankfully).
And we read important and messed up stories because they tell us something about ourselves.
I don't know why this struck me so much, maybe because it is 2026, maybe because I've passed through the location it's set in, but it did. So much so, that I wrote this post about it.
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