“Today is August 4, 2026.”
It isn't while I write this, as I'll be overseas, but it's a special date enough to schedule a post.
August 4th, 2026 is the setting date for the only piece of Ray Bradbury's writing I've ever actually liked: There Will Come Soft Rains.
The short story is a popular one, at least here in the U.S., for classrooms to have students read and discuss: it's short enough that even students who struggle to read can get through it rather quickly, and it's of a contemplative enough subject that everyone will have thoughts on.
For those who haven't read it (seriously though, it's a short story - just go read it in the link above): in it, a house run on automation starts the day, runs through its scheduled functions and tasks, schedules out its entertainments and reminders, and manages the lives of its inhabitants. Quickly, the reader realizes that these duties are performed for no one: there's no one living there. No spoken details are given about their whereabouts.
As the story progresses, you are given the only clue as to what happened outside: five blast shadows baked into the charred outside, capturing a moment in time like a reverse photograph. The house sits alone in a destroyed city.
The house, at the end of the story, burns down. All of its functions finally stopping, barring the voice announcing the date: August 5, 2026.
I wouldn't say it's the most provocative story for the modern era. Almost everyone has heard the concept of nuclear war wiping out humanity in the modern age, though major nuclear powers aren't as trigger happy about trying to make it happen as they used to be. But May 6, 1950 was more than 76 years ago, and still close to the dawn of the nuclear age. Everyone was terrified of nuclear annihilation.
Bradbury's short story was, at the time, the latest in a series of works across multiple authors wondering about what would happen if humanity wiped itself out with its petty squabbles escalating into all-out war that destroyed all of its belligerents. There were several written for the nuclear era, as the horrors of atomic warfare brought a fresh wave of anxiety and paranoia anew.
But it was still only the latest in that series.
Over thirty years prior, Sara Teasdale wrote There Will Come Soft Rains, the inspiration in both subject and title for Bradbury's short story. Bradbury even includes the poem inside the short story itself, noting Teasdale as Mrs. McClellan's favorite poet (a woman with good taste, I see). Teasdale wrote it sometime in 1917/1918, at the height of World War I and around the start of the German Offensive. At the time, it seemed as if the war was never going to end, and all belligerent nations were just sending their young soldiers off into a pointless meat grinder with no hope of actually winning.
The poem considered what the world would be like if humanity just never stopped fighting, and "mankind perished utterly." Her thoughts were that the world would move on, and we would be little more than a footnote in the history of the world. It was one of the first 20th Century considerations of humans driving themselves to extinction.
Teasdale was the first awardee of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, before there even was a dedicated poetry category. She was highly influential for many authors in the 20th Century, using lyric that was normally reserved for quainter verse for unhappier themes - a poetic style more associated with Dickinson than anyone else.
This post is, primarily, a half celebration/half talk about my favorite poet and an influential work that was inspired by her own lyric. But it's important to remember these past works that discuss end-of-the-world thoughts in modern times. The world often feels hopeless: unending wars, climate change, unbridled hate for the pettiest of reasons, and ceaseless greed. But it's never a hopeless situation. We've been here before. People will live to see another day. The world might forget us when we're gone, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't show kindness to each other while we're still here.
It means something to someone, I promise.
“[Tomorrow] is August 5, 2026, [tomorrow] is August 5, 2026, [tomorrow] is...”
