Let Me Walk You Through The Pedestrian
The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury.
It starts out seeming like a normal, boring, story about a guy going for a walk.
Its not.
I mean, yeah he really does go for a walk, talks to a cop, and gets in his car. Doesn't sound very interesting, does it?
That's not the point of this story though. The action that occurs in this story, actually happened to Ray Bradbury. He went for a walk and got harassed by a police officer. He was so distraught about what had happened that he went home and wrote a story about it. A very powerful one.
A man, Leonard Mead, goes for a walk at eight at night on a cold November evening in 2053. As he walks, he notices that there is not a person in sight. Strange isn't it? Bradbury felt so alone in that moment, the loneliness caused by technology. Technology affects everyone, in time of Bradbury's life and in the time of ours. In Bradbury's life, there were cars and phones that seperated people and led to a decrease in human contact. In our lives, our phones take us away from people entirely. We say that we use our phones to contact people, but tell me this, which do you have more of: online friends or real face-to-face friends?
This is what Bradbury wrote about. The fact that technology has seperated people so much that if a man is caught walking on the sidewalk, he is looked at with suspicion as if he did something wrong. Bradbury did nothing wrong though, and he got in so much trouble for it.
This story has taught me so much in just a short story. Maybe I will start keeping contact with real people and go for walks and observe life. Maybe one day I might be arrested because I did something unusual, something that causes suspicion. Go Bradbury!
It starts out seeming like a normal, boring, story about a guy going for a walk.
Its not.
I mean, yeah he really does go for a walk, talks to a cop, and gets in his car. Doesn't sound very interesting, does it?
That's not the point of this story though. The action that occurs in this story, actually happened to Ray Bradbury. He went for a walk and got harassed by a police officer. He was so distraught about what had happened that he went home and wrote a story about it. A very powerful one.
A man, Leonard Mead, goes for a walk at eight at night on a cold November evening in 2053. As he walks, he notices that there is not a person in sight. Strange isn't it? Bradbury felt so alone in that moment, the loneliness caused by technology. Technology affects everyone, in time of Bradbury's life and in the time of ours. In Bradbury's life, there were cars and phones that seperated people and led to a decrease in human contact. In our lives, our phones take us away from people entirely. We say that we use our phones to contact people, but tell me this, which do you have more of: online friends or real face-to-face friends?
This is what Bradbury wrote about. The fact that technology has seperated people so much that if a man is caught walking on the sidewalk, he is looked at with suspicion as if he did something wrong. Bradbury did nothing wrong though, and he got in so much trouble for it.
This story has taught me so much in just a short story. Maybe I will start keeping contact with real people and go for walks and observe life. Maybe one day I might be arrested because I did something unusual, something that causes suspicion. Go Bradbury!
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