There Will Come Soft Rains

August 2026:  There Will Come Soft Rains

-- Ray Bradbury

            Smoke and silence…Dawn showed faintly in the east.  Among the ruins, one wall stood alone.  Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…”’

            Humans are living evidence of evolution.  We have grown from nomads to independently living individuals capable of caring for making rational judgments, sustaining life and ourselves with ease.  A day is the same as everyday other day for us.  But to ponder the question of what was going through Bradbury’s mind noting that this piece of writing was published in 1950 leads me to ask, does he think we will one day evolve so much to a point where technological advances will overtake the human race one day?  “And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn/ would scarcely know that we were gone” (qtd. in Bradbury 3).  It’s like no matter how far we go with our new advances, the world will as a whole stay the same.  The sun is still going to rise in the mornings, and set in the evenings.  The moon will still come out as light during darkness, the seasons will continue to pass like ritual clockwork.  The only thing missing would be us.  And it is interesting to note that being in the year 2014, a lot of technology has overtaken us already.  When friends go out in groups for dinner, you can almost always expect the majority of them to be glued to their hand held touch screens, lighting up with whatever was more important in their hand then what was going on in the real world.  To imagine that a man from the 1950s made such a claim that is so relevant today stuns me.  Technology is such a big part of our lives, some people have anxiety without it and it’s hard to believe that not too long ago were we without such luxuries.  To have a house maintain itself on its own, as though in authority of all who lived in it is quite a thought within itself.  I wonder how a man who wrote this so long ago, would have known how on point he was nearing the futuristic time period he labeled in his title. 

 It is like the rain will come to wash us away.  After the decayed, after all is gone.  Growth comes from being watered.  It will begin a new evolution from its purest form.