by Ray Bradbury
Before ascending to those heights, however, let the eye wander over the comfortable lounge chairs gathered in twos or threes before several fireplaces on the opposing wall of our longest-highest Victorian Book Shoppe. Here, if they wish, readers can gather to read or chat in the light of those nice, mellow, jungle-green glass reading lamps that soften the air and touch the mind to relax and enjoy.
Coffee should be available at all hours for a reasonable sum to be deposited, on the honor system, in a porcelain plate near the urn.
On the main floor would be, one would suppose, current best-sellers in a variety of fields, with a dark alcove at the far end, perhaps, for mysteries, old and new—a miniature, cobwebbed maze to itself, and entered, perhaps, by a squealing, half-secret door.
On the second level up the spiral stair would be the arts, philosophy, the social sciences, essays in various fields, theater, and cinema.
As we climb the stairs, the various book sections, by title, whisper to us: Here I am: Kipling! Jane Austen, here! And here gentle voices at tea or passing herds of antelope, dimly rising and fading.
Among the shelves would be robot heads, which speak the mysteries of nearby books, the head of a pirate here, the head of a rocket engineer there, along with little scenes, dioramas, half-mechanized, showing us vistas of scenes from books. And there are poke-holes, allotted here or there where a child, or an adult, if they wish, can poke their heads through into space environments, jungle environments, private dioramas, with music, for one person at a time…
Along with, here and there, reading cubbies where one person can curl up and read, or window seats with visions of far, special countries; again for one child or one older person at a time.
And finally, descending, wouldn’t it make sense that there would be a basement Egyptian tomb, in which we stash and keep all the books on archeology, the natural sciences, anthropology, etc. An Egyptian mummy in full panoply, would stand at the mouth of the Learning Tomb telling you what wonders waited below in the Basement of Old Time. You go down into the Ages, even as you would go down into the digs of ancient cities. Rome, Athens, Thebes, Tyre, Nineveh, The Hanging Gardens, lie below.
At the bottom of the stairs we read: The Library at Alexandria and half, at least, of our experience downstairs is wandering into an environment with papyrus stashed here and scrolls tumbled there; the old and long lost Library of Egypt.
Every shelf would have its burden of sweet, new books, but for at least a foot or so on each shelf, a remnant of Old Time, a mask, a mummy’s face, a scarab beetle, or a simple gathering of old cuneiform books or papyrus. It is a tomb, alright, but a tomb that worships life, living, learning, instead of Egyptian death. Who would not want to go down those stairs to relight their inner fires?
Somewhere in our Time Maze shopping center should be a miniature cinema whose name might be: The Knights Of The Last Reel Elite Cinema (Or: Great Dreams, Great Scenes Repeated By The Dozen) where you go to see the favorite of all the scenes in your most beloved films. Here, for eight minutes is that fabulous scene where Lawrence goes back over the Arabian desert to find the lost camel driver and returns in triumph—a triumph of human endeavor, plus a triumph in filmmaking.
Here are the last ten minutes, and the best of Snow White. Here are the last eight minutes of Sleeping Beauty, with Maleficent Turned Dragon in all her evil glory. Here comes Norma Desmond down the stairs for her last closeup. There hangs Quasimodo from his gargoyles or ringing his bells. Here dies Juliet and then Romeo. Next comes Rosebud tossed on the fire at the finale of Citizen Kane. Here are the last four minutes of Things To Come when the rocket rises toward Destiny and Cabell (Raymond Massey) asks, “Which shall it be? The stars? Or nothing?” A glorious theater, in sum, where you can duck in for an hour of your delicious memory treats, eight minutes of this, five of that, with Bugs Bunny thrown in for dessert. Tickets? Fifty cents of a buck!
***
Thus, in a single evening, we have been lost—gladly, in a womb of restaurants, only to plunge ourselves into a wilderness of Space and Time, so as to emerge and wander a labyrinth of shops from 400 B.C., 1066 A.D., 1928 America, sixteenth-century Persia, Shogun Japan, and the year 3199 in the Impossible Future. Three ways of choosing life detours so as to vanish out of your ordinary life. It’s all here, count ’em, go, choose, do!
Some nights, or days, you come for the Restaurant Maze,
Or the Wild Experiences.
Or merely shop.
Choose or Mix. Then go home with a new Psyche in your blood.
As for me, I’ve just read all I’ve written. Exhausted, I think I’ll lie down!
1990
A FEASTING OF THOUGHTS, A BANQUETING OF WORDS
Ideas on the Theater of the Future
Imagine a room with 40 men and women seated with empty chairs on either side of them. Eighty chairs in all, but only 40 occupied. It is a robot’s banquet in the year 2010, and I have been invited.
I enter and am greeted with a chorus of voices. The men and women at the tables raise their glasses to me and call out.
“Here, no here, here, no here!”
And I sit now with Plato, now with Aristotle, now with Emily Dickinson, in a great feasting of thoughts and a banqueting of words.
“Dear Mr. Bradbury!”
Plato seizes my hand briskly.
“Sir,” I say. “How goes it with your Republic?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Of course. How does this whole place work? The company of poets. The room of artists. The museum of philosophy. The corridor of history—?”
“Enough! You have asked much, allow me to make a brief response. Not long ago a boy, quite small, but very curious, came here. His journey makes a fine small tale.”
“I’m ready,” I say.
“Well then. The boy ran through the Robot Museum of Time and Place and thought and stared in at that door marked, Greece.”
There, far across a moonlit plain, under a big tree, breaking bread and drinking wine, sat three old men in white robes. They waved.
The boy approached their table, carefully. He listened to the gentle hum of their hidden machineries, and said:
“Shouldn’t I be afraid of you? People say: machines dehumanize people. Yes?”
“People say,” Plato laughed gently. “Sit down, boy. Join us in a… Dialogue. Do we look as if we might corrupt people with our cogs, wheels, and electric circuits?”
“Well…”
“Two thousand years ago,” said the Aristotle robot, “simple machines stood before our temples. Coins, put in those machines, dispensed holy water. Even then we said, what other miracles, strange or terrifying, might be born of science.”
“And,” said the third man, Socrates, “new miraculous machines were born over the years.”
“And were they bad or good?” asked the boy.
“Neither. In between. Like animals, machines know not themselves. So you cannot blame or praise a machine.”
“Yet people do,” said Plato. “Men have always feared new ideas arriving, especially when they jump up in three-dimensional forms, devices that move and do things by themselves.”
“Reconsider, Plato. Are there no machines in the long history since we were born and died and are reborn again as robots speaking truths, are there absolutely no machines one can call evil, or saintly?”
“None.”
“None?” asked the boy.
“None and more than none. From the time of our Apollo god to the time of your Apollo rockets, boy, no machines deserved to be tried, found guilty, named murderer and destroyed.”
“But some folks—”
“Yes, some folks revile and loathe, abhor and shudder at the very thought of machines that ‘think.’” But ours are borrowed thoughts, boy. We do but speak old breakfast truths at lunch. We are electric sparrows that peck at ancient bread crumbs. People ask the wrong questions. Ask not if this machine is evil or good, but if this machine or that teases so
me men to do evil or good.”
“Can machines make men do things?”
“Not really, no. Men have free will, do they not?”
“I had always supposed so.”
“Nevertheless, machines tempt men. They are the Snake and the Apple in this modern garden world. By simply existing, machines provoke.”
“For example?”
“Well, look at those millions of chariot cars, drawn up at the curb. They cloud the air with heavenly vapors. They charge the wind with power. They call all young men to connive in their own destruction. So off they leap and roar away. Is the machine guilty when they die?”
“No, man-plus-machine is guilty,” said Aristotle.
“Sadly true. And the machine, by simply standing as a fair woman stands unknowing in the marketplace, demands action. Men give to the machine what it lacks, impulse and will. Together they spell doom.”
“Machines then can, by their design, their color, their shape, their idea, lead us astray?”
“Was Eve’s apple evil? No. But eating it was. The car is not evil. But driving that same car when filled with fermented grain is self-murder most foul.”
“If, by their design, some machines tempt us, doesn’t it follow that other machines, differently designed, will hold to the Golden Mean?”
“We are such machines.”
“Vanity, Plato, vanity. Are we never wicked?”
“We could be programmed for wickedness, to teach the immoral and the debauched. But good men have tinkered with our electro-magnetic gizzards. Our sound tripes are excellent. We keep the best. We speak wisdom. We promote humanity.”
“But we are not wise in ourselves?”
“The men who built us are wise. They set the first example. We set the second example by existing. All those who listen and follow us set the third. Together, we make a common race slowly rising to, rather than away from, the sun.”
“If this is true, why then do people cry out against machines and not the men who use them to bad ends?”
“It is the same impulse that makes one damn the racket when the shuttlecock behaves poorly on the summer air, or blast the turf when the golf ball veers. We are the recipients of wrath, dear Aristotle, because we stand in the midst of events. We machines move, often, when man himself stands still. We are an impulse that simulates life. Don’t be surprised if the curses that are hurled at the automobile sometimes ricochet off and strike us. Each and every machine is a teacher, is it not, simply by being an idea in motion? The car teaches power and speed as well as exhilaration. The rifle teaches destruction. The hydrogen bomb teaches, ironically, Christian principles. By its very size it says: Everyone sit down! In the midst of all this, we and other machines go about the fields of cities, toiling and spinning.”
“What other machines lean us toward light rather than dark, Plato? Let us make a list.”
“Motion picture projectors, tape recorders, radios, records, television, each speak books when books are not present but, better, turn us around to books if books we have never tried.”
“The camera, then, is a simple machine that does vast things?”
“By taking proper pictures, yes, it dissolves the flesh of three billion people to make us all one. By showing us the great Earth from Space, it proves we are one race of many fantastic parts, each needful of the others’ survival, each wanting to know the other. And now the time of knowing is at hand, and we splendid, huge new Toys are here to help the knowing. Right, boy?”
“I—” said the boy.
“In sum, fear not machines but men. And fear not men but merely half-educated men. To those we must add a half of ourselves, hoping to make one creature of two parts. Man joined to woman makes marriage. Mind joined to mind flints ignorance on ignorance, erodes prejudice, and fires the hearth where all may sit to warm hands and minds. Well then, boy, how do you like our answers?”
“Swell!” said the boy.
“Do you recall in my Dialogues I speak of men living each in his own cave, looking upon dim walls to see shadows of the outside world, each guessing what that truth may be? Well, boy, we are the new shadows, played not only on walls for men to guess, but as shapes that walk and may be touched. Time’s up. Goodbye. Run, boy, run.”
“I’m running, thanks.”
“Oh, boy?” The boy stopped. Plato called, “Do you fear us now?”
“Oh, no, no. Thanks. Goodbye!”
“There,” said Plato, gently. “The boy’s gone. And we? Are we really here, my friends?”
“Yes and no. Good Plato, we are a mystery and a paradox. Let us speak on that.”
“Yes, even though we hear without hearing and tell without telling.”
The old men sat in the drowsy shade of eternal noon.
“Someone begin,” said Plato.
All talked at once.
“Much thanks,” I said, and I rose and changed seats and spoke to Sara Teasdale and Sir Beerbohm Tree. And I rose to go now with William Butler Yeats and take tiffin with Shakespeare as he gave me Richard’s first dark speech. So I moved around the endless table, breaking my fast with splendid words, meeting and basking with talented people reborn in robots to outlast time.
All this, Theater of the Future?
Yes, or one variety thereof.
What other shapes will Future Theater take?
Will it be truly new and exciting and alive? Will people swarm to it as they once swarmed, wild bees in need of pontifical-political-aesthetic honey?
Will multimedia grab it all and own it?
Will theater vanish into the darkness behind the silver screen only to reappear with larger vocal cords, bigger ears, wider body, vaster significance?
In other words, will everything become one big hard-rock festival, super-radio, Cinerama-TV Long-Playing Cinema?
Or can the quiet voice, well-articulated, small idea well ventilated, single actor well-educated and speaking very much alone and softly, prevail?
It is too early on in the twenty-first century to say.
One can guess, but one cannot truly tell.
I have guessed at the influence of holograms on our lives, in one instance.
By the sheerest of accidents I ran across some old friends one night a few years back. They were on their way to someone’s apartment, and invited me to come along to sit in on a séance with some newly invented “ghosts.”
Which is to say three-dimensional images tossed forth on the air before, or rather in, one’s eyeballs, shot there by the expert marksmanship of a laser-beam projector.
With my first view of these holographic ghosts, I thought, my God, how wonderful to come back once every fifty years for the next ten-thousand years to see what we’ll be up to in the Arts. We’ll be turning ourselves inside out, upside-down, wrongside-to with light, color, sound, and the speaking of previously unspeakable tongues! Lord give me that gift. Let me come back, let me hear and see and know!
In the year 2035, not so far off across the sill, I imagined a typical home where, white or cocoa-tinted (which will be very in that year) men, women, and children, will exercise rather than exorcise their “ghosts.”
The son summons up the Hound of the Baskervilles, which lurks in the shadows of his bedroom. It bounds forth, projected in three dimensions, by a laser-beam photo “emanator” hidden in his ceiling.
Simultaneously, the daughter calls for and is answered by Kathie, who rushes in a storm of snow, across the floor of her living quarters to vanish in the cold hills of Wuthering Heights.
The father speaks to and is answered by Hamlet’s Father’s Ghost, who rises in battlements and speaks memory and prophecy in one intonation.
The mother, kitchen-bound, is instructed by a three-dimensional holograph of a Cooking Witch, who appears in clouds of steam but vanishes in mists of spice.
Late at night, each person, attended by their own laser-ghost, beds down, touches a panel-button and sees first the Hound sink into the long grass of the Moor, then Kathie lost in
storms, dwindling into the nap of the rug, then Hamlet’s Father turned to a mist within a mist, and the Cooking Witch with a last steam-kettle sigh, jackstraw heaping herself in a corner to melt, gone, all gone, and the time of sleep come.
Theater. Not just in a large house on a vast stage, but whispering at your ear, jiggling your elbow and your subconscious. Robot mosquitoes sizzling about your head as if it were a cider jug, repeating Pasts, advising Futures.
Theater.
What other ways will it walk in the years ahead?
During the past few years I have helped organize a Theater of Philosophy course at Santa Ana College. Within the classroom context, and occasionally using a semi-theater, we have begun plans to stage what was always a stage piece from the beginning: Plato’s Republic. Burgess Meredith appeared to dramatize sections of the books of Don Juan by Castaneda. I took off and flew around a bit with Kazantzakis’ religious/philosophical explosion, The Saviours of God. For the Future, the possibility of staging Shaw’s play Prefaces, with not just one but why not two Shaws on stage? Played by two actors engaged in verbal colics and amiable deliriums? Shaws I and II I call it; and I have finished a manuscript on this with Shaw Positive and Shaw Negative filling an evening with his Prefaces, his Musical Criticisms, his occasional despair with mankind, and his hopes for the Life Force and mouth-to-mouth breathing the Universe to survive.
What else up ahead?
Robot theaters of history. Rooms into which you walk to see humanoid machines seated under trees on a summer afternoon and walk over to sit with them and say, “Caesar, how go the Roman roads through Britain?” And he shows you. And: “Euripides and Aristotle, how does one write a play, a poem?”
