the day it rained forever by ray bradbury

Families draped themselves on their sofas waiting for the static to end… Until the “fair women of great purpose and dignity” hand the men paintbrushes and paint cans (103). Rock Junction, like countless American cities and towns, entered a state of morose confusion. Extreme sunspots flooded the whole damn world “with electricity,” wiping out every T.V.

Four weeks earlier on Saturday morning the TV-centric rituals of life–children watching clowns and magicians, women watching TV fashion at beauty shops, men in hardware stories transfixed by trout fishing and baseball–suddenly end (101). And through the din, with a voice as remote “as the voice of a man describing an Artic landscape” (101), the barber Antonelli recounts the coming of “the great Oblivion” (104). They walk into the barbershop–where normally beneath the “naked-lady calendars” they recount their “philosophy of rocks and mirages” (97)–and are met with a wall of raucous sound. But as they enter Rock Junction, something seems immediately amiss as builds and fences are garishly painted and yards of barren dirt filled with vegetable gardens and flowers.

Their stories and reminisces represent the possibility of escape from the realities of daily life. Opening his mouth, in town, he breaths it out” (97). Silence of the river shallows deep in the canyons. Silence of sagebrush, or a mountain lion purring like a warm beehive at noon. Normally their stories of the darkest of nights and the extreme isolation of the desert would transfix the urban folk: “Set a man way out in the strange lands and he fills with wellsprings of silence. In the near future (1961), Willy Bersinger and Samuel Fitts, two miners, approach the town of Rock Junction, Arizona. “Almost the End of the World” (1957) ruminates on the effects on American society if a cosmic event severs the viewer from the succor of the screen. The city, observed by the solitary one-time writer Leonard Mead, is as silent as “a wintry, windless Arizona country” (90).

The lovely and crystalline “The Pedestrian” (1951) imagined a future night city in which its denizens are transfixed by their TV scenes. Multiple Bradbury stories critique this new world. In multiple earlier reviews in this series, I’ve laid out television’s transformative and speedy infiltration of the American consciousness and daily activities over the course of the 1950s. If you have an Internet Archive account, you can read it online here. It later appeared in his short story collection The Day It Rained Forever (1959). Ray Bradbury’s “Almost the End of the World” first appeared in The Reporter (December 26, 1957).

Adrian Chesterman’s cover for the 1980 edition of The Day It Rained Forever (1959).

The day it rained forever by ray bradbury