Happy 100th Birthday to one of our greatest sources of inspiration - Ray Bradbury, who wrote beautiful stories about regular humans in extraordinary circumstances. Kimberly discusses the first Bradbury story she ever read, All Summer In a Day.
Purchase the Ray Bradbury story collection A Medicine for Melancholy here: https://amzn.to/3aA3UK4
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TRANSCRIPT
Welcome everybody to the first episode of Socratica Reads.
My name is Kimberly Hatch Harrison, and I’m the co-founder of Socratica.
We make beautiful educational videos.
We specialize in futuristic learning - math, science, and programming like you’ve never seen it before.
When I’m not making videos, I spend a lot of my time reading.
In this podcast, I’m sharing the books that have inspired us and sparked creative ideas.
I’m focusing on Science Fiction - which is like imagination personified. Personified isn’t really the right word. Encapsulated.
It is an AUSPICIOUS day to start this venture.
August 22nd, 2020.
We’re celebrating Ray Bradbury’s 100th Birthday.
Ray Bradbury said, (I’m gonna read a quote) “Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about."
You tell ‘em, Ray.
Ray Bradbury has been an important figure in my life since I was 9 years old.
When I was 9, I started the 4th grade, and at my grammar school every year they would hand out a small book called a reader - that was how we studied English.
These little readers had a lot of grammar exercises, and about a dozen short stories.
I would always take my reader home and read ALL the short stories in a day or two. Yeah, I was that kind of kid.
Well, that year, for the first time, I read a story by Ray Bradbury. It was about a little girl, 9 years old, who didn’t fit in with her classmates. They all scorned her because she was different. I couldn’t believe it - someone was writing about ME. He was telling MY STORY!
I mean, not LITERALLY, but still. By some miracle, Ray Bradbury understood me. I was a VERY bookish girl who got thick glasses in the beginning of the 4th grade (although I really should have gotten them in the 3rd grade), and I started pulling away from my classmates academically, socially, in all ways, really. I was like a little adult in the 4th grade. And my classmates could sense that I was something different, and they didn’t want to be around me anymore. My best friend unceremoniously dumped me, just stopped talking to me.
And so I really related to this girl in the story. It was called “All Summer in a Day.” I remember saying out loud, when I finished it - “This is the saddest story I’ve ever read.” And I still think that.
I’m going to read you an excerpt. This story is found in the collection “A Medicine for Melancholy” and I’ll include a link in the show notes. I hope you will go buy this collection of Ray Bradbury stories if you don’t already have it, or many on your shelf, like I do. Now let’s hear Ray Bradbury’s words on this, his one hundredth birthday.
Ready? Let’s begin.
The children pressed to each other like so
many roses, so many weeds, intermixed,
peering out for a look at the hidden sun.
It rained.
It had been raining for seven years;
thousands upon thousands of days
compounded and filled from one end to the
other with rain, with the drum and gush of
water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers
and the concussion of storms so heavy they
were tidal waves come over the islands. A
thousand forests had been crushed under
the rain and grown up a thousand times to
be crushed again. And this was the way life
was forever on the planet Venus, and this
was the schoolroom of the children of the
rocket men and women who had come to a
raining world to set up civilization and live
out their lives.
"It’s stopping, it’s stopping !"
"Yes, yes !"
Margot stood apart from them, from these
children who could ever remember a time
when there wasn’t rain and rain and rain.
They were all nine years old, and if there
had been a day, seven years ago, when the
sun came out for an hour and showed its
face to the stunned world, they could not
recall. Sometimes, at night, she heard them
stir, in remembrance, and she knew they
were dreaming and remembering gold or a
yellow crayon or a coin large enough to buy
the world with. She knew they thought they
remembered a warmness, like a blushing in
the face, in the body, in the arms and legs
and trembling hands. But then they always
awoke to the tatting drum, the endless
shaking down of clear bead necklaces upon
the roof, the walk, the gardens, the forests,
and their dreams were gone.
All day yesterday they had read in class
about the sun. About how like a lemon it
was, and how hot. And they had written
small stories or essays or poems about it:I
think the sun is a flower,That blooms for just
one hour. That was Margot’s poem, read
in a quiet voice in the still classroom while
the rain was falling outside.
"Aw, you didn’t write that!" protested one
of the boys.
"I did," said Margot. "I did."
"William!" said the teacher.
But that was yesterday. Now the rain was
slackening, and the children were crushed in
the great thick windows.
Where’s teacher ?"
"She’ll be back."
"She’d better hurry, we’ll miss it !"
They turned on themselves, like a
feverish wheel, all tumbling spokes. Margot
stood alone. She was a very frail girl who
looked as if she had been lost in the rain for
years and the rain had washed out the blue
from her eyes and the red from her mouth
and the yellow from her hair. She was an old
photograph dusted from an album, whitened
away, and if she spoke at all her voice would
be a ghost. Now she stood, separate,
staring at the rain and the loud wet world
beyond the huge glass.
"What’re you looking at ?" said William.
Margot said nothing.
"Speak when you’re spoken to."
He gave her a shove. But she did not
move; rather she let herself be moved only
by him and nothing else. They edged away
from her, they would not look at her. She felt
them go away. And this was because she
would play no games with them in the
echoing tunnels of the underground city. If
they tagged her and ran, she stood blinking
after them and did not follow. When the
class sang songs about happiness and life
and games her lips barely moved. Only
when they sang about the sun and the
summer did her lips move as she watched
the drenched windows. And then, of course,
the biggest crime of all was that she had
come here only five years ago from Earth,
and she remembered the sun and the way
the sun was and the sky was when she was
four in Ohio. And they, they had been on
Venus all their lives, and they had been only
two years old when last the sun came out
and had long since forgotten the color and
heat of it and the way it really was.
But Margot remembered.
"It’s like a penny," she said once, eyes
closed.
"No it’s not!" the children cried.
"It’s like a fire," she said, "in the stove."
"You’re lying, you don’t remember !" cried
the children.
But she remembered and stood quietly
apart from all of them and watched the
patterning windows. And once, a month ago,
she had refused to shower in the school
shower rooms, had clutched her hands to
her ears and over her head, screaming the
water mustn’t touch her head. So after that,
dimly, dimly, she sensed it, she was different
and they knew her difference and kept
away. There was talk that her father and
mother were taking her back to Earth next
year; it seemed vital to her that they do so,
though it would mean the loss of thousands
of dollars to her family. And so, the children
hated her for all these reasons of big and
little consequence. They hated her pale
snow face, her waiting silence, her thinness,
and her possible future.
I really do hope you read the rest of this story, if you haven’t already. Because if you were anything like me as a child, you will recognize how miraculous it was, that Ray Bradbury wrote a story about us. Somehow, as a grown man in the 1950s, he knew what it was like to be a weird 9 year old girl in the 1980s. I was not alone.
This is the power of really good science fiction. It opens the door to examining people in a different way. Somehow, because you accept this otherworldly scenario, you also buy in to these characters. I’m not sure that Ray Bradbury would have gotten away with telling a straightforward narrative about a weird 9 year old girl. We’d say, well what does HE know about it. But because he’s telling us a made-up story about Venus, he can SNEAK in with these dead accurate insights about human nature.
There’s a kind of a thread running through a lot of Bradbury, this affection for the oddballs who are true to themselves. You read his stories and you come away with a lot of love and understanding. I carry that with me, and I think maybe you can sense that in our work at Socratica. We will never talk down to you or make you feel strange because you love to read or you like to study science or you collect dinosaur toys. You’re safe with us, you’re among friends.
So I say to my friend Ray Bradbury on his birthday: I love you, thank you, Live Forever!
