twilight zone/ray bradbury/ crossdressing
Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2008 12:33 am
My family and I brought in the New Year by watching the Twilight Zone Marathon. What a bunch of old fogeys but that's another topic......
One of the episodes was called "All The Time In The World" and has been told by a number of different authors in a number of other settings. A man discovers that everyone else is gone. In this telling he loves to read. He goes to the library, overjoyed that he has all the time he wants to read now. Then he breaks his glasses.
Ray Bradbury told it another way in The Thousand Year Picnic, and did another variation in The Martian Chronicles. Arthur Clarke told it with a story about glaciers. And then there was On The Beach which was a different story but it's description of visiting an uninhabited North America had some of the same effect.
Anyway the theme in all these stories is one person (or a few people sometimes) alone, everyone else is gone. And so they can do whatever they want. And so they hole up with books or eat chocolate all the time or travel the country by railroad handcar.
Whenever I read these stories as a child I would think of going into all my neighbors houses and trying on all the womens clothing. Or just running around in a dress all the time. Which lets face it, is a bit wierd. I mean On The Beach is about humanities extinction in a nuclear war and I am seeing this as an opportunity to rummage through my neighbors lingerie before I die?
I guess we could get all analytical about for many of us at one time CDing was an isolating experience. And I think the idea of what would you do if you were alone in the world is probably one of those universal themes, if for no reason than that we are by nature social creatures, descended from gregarious monkeys rather than solitary grizzly bears.
But anyway my question is this. Who else here read stories like this or saw them on tv and had the same reaction?
Don't be shy. I'm sure a lot of people here had the same feeling.
Absaroka
One of the episodes was called "All The Time In The World" and has been told by a number of different authors in a number of other settings. A man discovers that everyone else is gone. In this telling he loves to read. He goes to the library, overjoyed that he has all the time he wants to read now. Then he breaks his glasses.
Ray Bradbury told it another way in The Thousand Year Picnic, and did another variation in The Martian Chronicles. Arthur Clarke told it with a story about glaciers. And then there was On The Beach which was a different story but it's description of visiting an uninhabited North America had some of the same effect.
Anyway the theme in all these stories is one person (or a few people sometimes) alone, everyone else is gone. And so they can do whatever they want. And so they hole up with books or eat chocolate all the time or travel the country by railroad handcar.
Whenever I read these stories as a child I would think of going into all my neighbors houses and trying on all the womens clothing. Or just running around in a dress all the time. Which lets face it, is a bit wierd. I mean On The Beach is about humanities extinction in a nuclear war and I am seeing this as an opportunity to rummage through my neighbors lingerie before I die?
I guess we could get all analytical about for many of us at one time CDing was an isolating experience. And I think the idea of what would you do if you were alone in the world is probably one of those universal themes, if for no reason than that we are by nature social creatures, descended from gregarious monkeys rather than solitary grizzly bears.
But anyway my question is this. Who else here read stories like this or saw them on tv and had the same reaction?
Don't be shy. I'm sure a lot of people here had the same feeling.
Absaroka