Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Prometheus Sunbound


We know its winter equivalent. But in summer? Is it possible to say we're sunbound?

In Ray Bradbury's "The Long Rain"(1950) a group of crashed astronauts make their way through the rainy jungles of Venus in search of a Sun Dome, which the indigenous Venusians keep destroying. One by one the crew goes mad. When the last of them reaches a Dome, we're not sure if its real or a hallucination.

Most everything Bradbury writes asks if what we are experiencing is real or, if not a hallucination, a construct. A heatwave is no different. The sun plays tricks on us, and the oasis we see is its opposite -- not water but a mirage.

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