Well, it is in most of the world (we’re only a couple of hours out of it here in Sydney), so it’s still relevant… Anyway, August 4th 2026 is the day on which a certain Ray Bradbury story takes place, at least in its original version; when it was fixed up as part of The Martian Chronicles, all the dates in the original stories that made up that book were advanced by 31 years so in the book it actually takes place in 2057. So presumably people will be marking the occasion again on this day in 2057… assuming, obviously, that reality doesn’t match the story’s premise at some point before then and there actually is still someone here to do so, which is something I am not sanguine about.
Incidentally, I only learned tonight that the story’s title was taken from this poem:
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Written by Sara Teasdale and published in July 1918 just as a certain war was coming into its last months and a certain pandemic was just starting to pick up where the war was leaving off. I wonder what Teasdale envisaged as being able to wipe out humanity? By the time Bradbury wrote his story nukes were the obvious option, but I don’t think they were even imagined in 1918… It’s a fairly grim poem (albeit optimistic that the animals will survive us) and the overall feeling I get is that Teasdale perhaps didn’t think “mankind perish[ing] utterly” would be a bad thing. And here we are on the day that the story that took its name from the poem is set, and in reality we’ve made a world that’s perhaps somewhat worse in some ways than Bradbury’s fictional one, to say nothing of Teasdale’s… I suppose we can only hope August 4th 2057 winds up being a better day. I love when this sort of existentialism hits me at 2am…
