THE PEDESTRIAN THEME HOW TO

Pretty corny stuff, and easy to condescend to, from this distance. “To the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies.” The car hesitated, or rather gave a faint whirring click, as if information, somewhere, was dropping card by punch-slotted card under electric eyes. Suddenly a robotic police car shines its very bright light on him, addressing him in a metallic voice, questioning him, and then ordering him to get in. The tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the gray or multicolored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.” Everything went on in the tomblike houses at night now, he thought, continuing his fancy. “Magazines and books didn’t sell any more. Mead, we learn, is a writer, though he hasn’t written anything for years. His neighbors are all inside, watching television. He never meets anyone else on these nocturnal walks. The protagonist, Leonard Mead, is walking alone at night, as is his wont. The story-set, implausibly, in 2053-expresses the fear of ruthlessly enforced conformity that was so strongly felt at that time. You can decide for yourself by reading “The Pedestrian.” It’s very short, and slight, but as a lifelong non-driver and a dedicated walker, I feel a certain affection for it. “Through these experiences,” Eller writes, in his charmingly orotund style, “he had come to see the pedestrian as a threshold or indicator species among urban dwellers-if the rights of the pedestrian were threatened, this would represent an early indicator that basic freedoms would soon be at risk.” Keller, “The Revolt of the Pedestrians,” published in 1928, but was triggered by two incidents over a span of years in which, while walking late at night with a friend in Los Angeles (with one friend in Pershing Square in 1940 with another on Wilshire Boulevard in 1949), Bradbury was hassled by the LAPD. Eller says the story was inspired in part by a very odd story by one David H. So was that it? A good deal later in the book, Eller mentions Bradbury’s story “ The Pedestrian,” written in 1950 and published in 1951. He repeats, in passing, the lore about Bradbury’s “abiding fear of automobiles-the multiple-fatality accident he had witnessed shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 1934 remained a recurring nightmare.” Oddly, in a book that leans heavily toward the psychological, Eller touches only glancingly on the subject. Eller, the co-founder of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, probably knows more about Bradbury than any other living person. Why didn’t Bradbury drive? In 2011, the University of Illinois Press published a fascinating book by Jonathan R. But Ray Bradbury was only 13 years old when his family moved from Waukegan, Illinois, to Los Angeles, California, the Vatican of car culture. And there have been places and times, since the advent of the Car Nation, when non-driving has not been so exceptional. Of course, non-drivers come in all shapes and sizes. In a society dominated by cars, where driving is the unquestioned norm, non-driving is not just a minor eccentricity. but he never drove a car.īut there is more to it than that. Some other retrospectives I’ve seen since Bradbury’s death have noted that he didn’t drive, generally treating it in one-liner fashion as an endearing quirk: He wrote about Mars.

THE PEDESTRIAN THEME HOW TO

(“Who says he was a genius? He didn’t even know how to drive.”) This was followed by a gallery of nine prominent non-drivers, including Studs Terkel, Mae West, Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Bishop, and Albert Einstein. one nonaccomplishment is also noteworthy: He never got a driver’s license.” Caption: “Ray Bradbury didn’t drive a car, but he was often out and about in Los Angeles, browsing bookstores, his bicycle propped outside.” And a sidebar noted that while Bradbury “had some amazing accomplishments. But most of the top half of page 3 was given to a gossipy feature by Mark Jacob, headlined thus: “BRADBURY RODE WITH SLOW COMPANY.” A large photo showed Bradbury on his bike. On June 7, our local paper, the Chicago Tribune, featured a page-one celebration of Bradbury by Julia Keller, which covered familiar territory. Yet one theme worthy of attention, so it seems to me, has been largely ignored.

In the month since Ray Bradbury died at the age of 91, a host of tributes have appeared, touching on almost every salient aspect of his long life and his exceptionally many-sided work.

The pedestrian theme